Entry into this audio is a bit bewildering as Julie Otsuka’s novel uses a first-person-plural point of view to meld the collective stories of Japanese mail-order brides at the turn of the twentieth century. Narrator Samantha Quan quickly dispels the confusion as she delivers the story with a rhythmic cadence. Each “we” introduces the listener to a new chorus of emotions and details. These create a haunting picture of relocation that encompasses adjustment struggles to new husbands and new homes and a stunning portrait of deportation to WWII internment camps. The final section of the story is narrated by Carrington MacDuffie. She presents additional viewpoints—this time of the whites who witness the Japanese women’s departures. MacDuffie captures their feelings of anger, guilt, and righteousness in a discordant coda.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
Duration: 4 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780307940742
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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