Three talented narrators portray three women whose stories draw the listener into this mystery. Sylvie Lee disappears while she is visiting Holland to be with her dying grandmother. Narrator Angela Lin portrays Sylvie, and Samantha Quan her younger sister, Amy; both capture the characters' individual personalities as presented by Kwok. However, Caroline McLaughlin's performance as their mother has no accent--even though the daughters refer more than once to her challenges with English, an inconsistency that is jarring to the listener. Kwok takes on many serious issues including the immigrant experience, sexism, and dysfunctional family relationships. She provides texture to her story with aphorisms, rich descriptions, and slowly unwinding reveals. Listeners will appreciate the insights but may find the ending a bit far-fetched.
Pub Date: June 4, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062933317
Publisher: Harper 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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