Josh Bloomberg narrates this charming story with a balance of heart, humor, and hope. His steady tempo and smooth enunciation draw the listener into this magical tale of love, loss, and new life. When Harry runs away to the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, hoping to escape the guilt and grief he feels over his wife's death, 10-year-old Oriana's unwavering faith in fairy tales leads him to a purposeful new life. Bloomberg energetically portrays the large cast of eccentric characters. From the raspy voice of Olive, the pipe-smoking librarian, to the voices of realistic Amanda, Oriana's mother; Wolf, Harry's bully of a brother; and Ronnie, the self-appointed guardian angel of Amanda and Oriana, to name but a few, tones of humor and pathos provide a perfect balance.
Pub Date: June 12, 2018
Duration: 15 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781488204685
Publisher: Harlequin 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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