Narrator Gabra Zackman infuses this story of quiet sexual violence with perfectly pitched numbness and despair. In the summer of 1978, a reckless prank goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of 15-year-old Jo's best friend. Lost and emotionally numb, Jo retreats to a posh boarding school, where she attracts the attention of popular Master Aikens, who is known to bestow unwanted sexual favors on his "favorites." Jo's efforts to seek help are predictably but devastatingly met with a chilling dismissiveness that reverberates for years to come. Zackman's understated delivery complements the book's bleak atmosphere, allowing the casual cruelty of Master, the school administrators, and Jo's classmates to surface without interference or adornment. A timely story that weighs heavily despite its brevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
Duration: 3 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508265092
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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