Narrator Dawn Harvey delivers this tale of labor and love, which takes place in a Colorado mining community from 1907 to 1909. Québecois American Sylvie Pelletier's union-minded father toils in the marble mines of Moonstone. Despite her natural sympathies for the miners, Sylvie's attracted to the mine owner's charismatic son--and the tempting opulence of his life, so different from the rigors of her own. The African American servants who work for his family add a complicating counterpoint to the conflict. Sylvie narrates the events from decades later, and Harvey deftly balances distance with immediacy. She is distinctly less successful with her accents. Listeners familiar with the sounds of French and French-accented English may find themselves wincing frequently, and many of the secondary characterizations tip into caricature. A mixed bag.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
Duration: 16 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781797140124
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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