Bean and Liz's selfish, deluded mother will seem familiar to the legions of Jeannette Walls fans. After being abandoned, the sisters travel cross-country to Byler, Virginia, to stay with their widowed and eccentric Uncle Tinsley. As narrator, Walls's spunky tone reflects Bean's inherent sense of fairness--and its lack of a filter. Despite his gruffness, Uncle Tinsley has a heart of gold. Bean meets relatives she didn't know she had, and their jocularity, optimism, and patriotism are clear in Walls's performance. As Liz and Bean work for mill foreman Jerry Maddox, his big talk makes it obvious that he's going to be a bad guy. The author's warm, funny reading makes for an uncomplicated but satisfying story in which justice is ultimately served.
Pub Date: June 11, 2013
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781442362864
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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