With its echoes of the JonBenet Ramsay case, Oates’s new novel delves into the intimate lives of those affected by the murder of tot figure-skating champion Bliss Rampike. Boldly satirical, this cautionary tale exposes Mummy and Daddy's misguided ambitions and acts as an elegy for the murdered Bliss and her brother Skyler's lost childhood. Through Mike Chamberlain's expert narration, one can hear Skyler's bewilderment at his parents' flaws and transparently selfish motives. Chamberlain aptly delivers Mummy's plaintive pitch, Daddy's booming machismo, and Bliss's strain. Chamberlain’s subtle vocalization conveys an urgency on behalf of the children as it portrays the sinister competition at the heart of contemporary American suburbia. As the story is told in the voice of 19-year old Skyler, one hears the leaden grief, guilt, and bitterness that have resulted from the unsolved tragedy ten years earlier.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
Duration: 22 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Books on Tape
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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