Grad student Cassie Quinn rushes home to her wealthy New York City family when her younger brother is arrested for raping his ex-girlfriend. Marilyn Ireland narrates this provocative story told by Cassie, which recounts the family's defense of her unfairly accused brother. She sees herself as sophisticated beyond her years, due to her own heartbreak after an affair with an older married man. Ireland's portrayal of Cassie is at first earnest, then becomes layered with languid self-importance as the listener begins to wonder whether she is aware of the depth of her own secrets. Ireland provides distinctive voices for Cassie's family--her cold and controlling mother, her suave father, her depressed and terrified younger brother--and does well to modify each portrayal as their hidden stories unfold.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063142053
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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