Karla Cornejo Villavicencio narrates her debut novel about undocumented immigrant Catalina Ituralde. Facing an uncertain future after her Harvard graduation, Catalina reflects on her time as a student and her childhood with her grandparents. Villavicencio speaks with a smile in her voice, capturing Catalina's skepticism and wry humor. Her melodic intonation lends itself well to Catalina's stories of the people around her. As Catalina's homelife begins to unravel, she is drawn to her classmate Nathan, who is an expert on the Latin America she can't remember. Refusing to be a symbol or cause, Catalina breaks away from the promise of safety to do things her own way. Told through vignettes and fantasies, this is a vibrant and fast-paced novel.
Pub Date: July 23, 2024
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593741511
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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