This audiobook, which examines grief, faith, and family, is told from the perspectives of three characters: Isaac, a teacher whose son was murdered; Evangeline, a pregnant teenager who has been abandoned by her mother; and Jonah, a teenager who killed his friend. Narrator Mark Deakins masterfully conveys Isaac's emotional turmoil as he struggles to understand both the murder and his feeling of distance from God, despite his devotion to Quaker practices. Narrator Kristen DiMercurio captures Evangeline's insecurities and fears, which color her reactions to Isaac's generous acts of kindness. Narrator Kirby Heyborne helps listeners feel Jonah's angst, defeatism, and sorrow as he contemplates suicide, which he sees as the only solution to his action. All three performances underscore the characters' conflicted relationships with those who are supposed to love them and their tentative steps toward redemption.
Pub Date: April 13, 2021
Duration: 13 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593394687
Publisher: Penguin 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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