Maarleveld has a remarkable gift for switching among the characters throughout this sensitive and compelling novel.
Saskia Maarleveld’s youthful, breathless voice is a superb match for 17-year-old Elizabeth "Parker" Phillips and the story of her fall from grace in this novel set in 1960s Southern California. As the Vietnam War rages overseas, Parker is projected to graduate as valedictorian and begin her studies at Stanford—until she meets free-spirited draft dodger Wiley, who winds up getting her pregnant. Schatz's author’s note, which details the sexual revolution and the lack of reproductive rights for women during this period of American history, puts her coming-of-age story into historical perspective.
Maarleveld has a remarkable gift for switching among the characters throughout this sensitive and compelling novel.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
Duration: 11 hrs, 41 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217278084
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: May 12, 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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