Narrator Edoardo Ballerini makes Rome blossom in this coming-of-age novella by Jess Walter (BEAUTIFUL RUINS) and Ballerini. It is 1993, and Jack Rigel, a diffident college student from Nebraska, wins a scholarship to study Latin at the Vatican. Italy overwhelms him at first--his linguistic knowledge is subpar, and he has no money. One day, a dejected Jack (perfectly emoted by Ballerini) blunders into a movie set on the streets of Trastevere and meets two erstwhile stars: an American TV detective and a beautiful Roman actress (aka the "Angel of Rome"). Ballerini deftly intertwines the bravado, beauty, and kindness of these characters with Jack's innocence, but his gift to the listener is his poignant portrayal of the present-day Jack--middle-aged, self-actualized, and forever grateful for the redemptive friendships forged in Rome.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 2 hrs
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
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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