Good performances abound in this audiobook. At its heart is ConaLee, a child swept up in the cruelty and uncertainty of the antebellum South. Karissa Vacker, the primary narrator, is a strong voice throughout the production. Similarly, Theo Stockman's performance of male points of view and Maggi-Meg Reed's renditions of the female characters are well paced and emotionally charged. ConaLee's little family is shattered by wartime violence, and the best moments in the audiobook are centered around the interactions among characters. Episodes unfold in a tangled order, and it takes a patient listener to follow along. Some sections languish due to stilted language and belabored points, but the story is largely engrossing, and, all in all, the narrators do a fine job with the material.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593787922
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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