Hannah Morrish's staggering performance as Joan enhances Chen's wonderful novel. We all know the story of Joan of Arc, the French teenager who led the Dauphin's army to victories before being burned at the stake as a heretic. Morrish is English, not French, but it doesn't matter a whit; her mastery of expressing class and emotion is stunning. Joan, who is taller than most men, becomes a scrappy fighter to defend herself against her abusive father, and she is fiercely loyal to her older sister. Morrish adopts an accent for Joan that incorporates her unsophisticated background and finds pacing that exhibits her passion and warrior soul. She also develops a plethora of character voices for soldiers, townspeople, and noblemen; the Dauphin's ambition to be king in spite of his lack of leadership qualities is clearly apparent.
Pub Date: July 5, 2022
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593605967
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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