Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley’s newest novel, a sublime paean to the American Midwest and its people, is enhanced by the clarity and subtle “gee-whiz” quality of Lorelei King’s narration. The story is a panoramic sweep of 30 years in an Iowa farm family. From the end of 1918 to the early 1950s, Rosanna and Walter Langdon and their children experience joys, sorrows, and challenges that define them—and our growing nation. King ably exploits Smiley’s narrative, which tells the story from differing viewpoints, to explore character through varying pace and speaking styles. She also changes her tone and roughens some character voices to increase our sense of the passing of time and a way of life. Well done.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
Duration: 14 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780804194112
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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