Narrator Anthony Rey Perez's Latin American accents are unerring in this emotionally charged audiobook about a woman who confronts ghosts from her past. Lina is back in her hometown of Medellín, Colombia, to find out more about her late mother and to reconnect with her childhood friend, Mattías, who runs a refuge for children. But it is a disappointing reunion, as Mattías seems distant, and the refuge hides dark secrets. Perez, even though he is not quite compelling in portraying Lina, amplifies the work's suspense as the mystery around her is revealed. The plot meanders, but Perez ramps up the tension with his varied pacing and evenly modulated voice. Listeners of literary fiction will find the horror twist intriguing.
Pub Date: May 12, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593169278
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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