Tara Sands is the lively voice of this hilarious rags-to-riches story of a Hollywood writer's dream turning into a nightmare. Fans of women's fiction will be thoroughly entertained by Sands's humorous delivery. She becomes Penelope Schleeman, a down-on-her-luck high school English teacher whose bestselling novel is slated for a big-screen adaptation. Sands makes the most of a hilarious setup: After Penelope is hired to write the screenplay for her novel, she finds herself being pressured to compromise its heroine, a feminist mermaid, to fit the studio's sexist stereotype. Sands captures the growing drama as the fictional mermaid seems to be sending Penelope warning signs against the compromises. The result is a hilarious exploration of what it means to be true to one's art.
Pub Date: March 21, 2023
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593670460
Publisher: Random House 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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