With understated compassion, Xavier Casals narrates Takacs's debut work about an oyster-farming family on the brink of collapse. Just after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, 34-year-old Jordan finds he needs the help of his estranged younger brother, Benny, to weather a financial crisis and their mother May's precarious situation. Casals infuses his voice with the weariness of a young man who has grown up too fast. But Jordan's conversations with others add liveliness. Though she's middle-aged, May is a coquettish Southern belle when she's with her beau, Doc. Benny comes across as soft and spoiled. Accents of the farm employees, Babies, Alejandro, Manuel, Hoa, and Linh, sound just right, although the pronunciations of Louisiana coastal place names need more attention.
Pub Date: June 25, 2024
Duration: 12 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781958506530
Publisher: Zibby Books
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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