Julie Schumacher, author of the Thurber Prize-winning academic comedy DEAR COMMITTEE MEMBERS, now turns her satirical eye on that classic college experience, the study-abroad trip. When Professor Jason Fitger unwillingly takes a motley student group to England in soggy, cold January, nothing goes as planned. Schumacher, a University of Minnesota Regents Professor of Creative Writing and English, writes with a mix of acid and sweetness, delivering humor and wisdom along the way. Her narration, while competently delivered in an agreeable mid-range voice, is not the same quality as the writing. Characters sound similar, challenging listeners to understand the subtleties of genuinely funny conversations. And the mix of a downbeat tone and unvaried pacing often squashes the wit in this delightful novel.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593745984
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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