Narrator Craig Lauzon flawlessly captures 1970s small-town Canada and introduces Jake, a trusting Boy Scout and altar boy. Lauzon deftly inhabits Jake, who loves his younger brother, Jamie, and his clueless parents. At age 12, Jake is robbed of his innocence when Father Sweet molests him. Sweet is perfectly rendered as the perfect predator--an intellectual whose preaching and chanting win over parishioners and church officials. Listeners will sadly observe Jake's loving personality change when he leaves the Catholic Church and Scouts and turns to alcohol to mask his pain. In Part 2, Jake is an adult who's lost his way because he carries this unresolved trauma. Listeners will cheer for him when he decides to speak up and help other victims, thereby overcoming his demons and looking hopefully to the future.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Dundurn
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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