Narrator Edoardo Ballerini’s clear and evocative delivery of Evison’s novel works splendidly. The story exists on several planes. The inner and outer lives of an Iraq War vet and former star football player named Dave Cartwright comprise one plane. The other focuses on a legend of long ago involving a native woman named S’tka who is cast out by her clan and survives on the edge of the ice with her son, N’ka. At several points there are reports from various locals on Dave’s flight to the mountains. Ballerini narrates at a good pace for this story of modern trauma. He is equally convincing in his portrayals of Dave; his 8-year-old daughter, Bella, the real heroine of the novel; and his brother, Travers, a hyper real estate developer. Ballerini’s performance is masterful.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Workman Publishing
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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