Narrator Marisa Calin brings a refreshing voice to the previously barely heard from and often mocked Mary Bennet, the middle and least lovely of the Bennet sisters in Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Calin's clear, prim British-accented dialogue fits perfectly with our understanding of Mary as she speaks with her family. But her inner voice allows listeners to feel the pain of rejection and of being the undesired sister no one takes seriously--as well as her ardent hopes for more. Calin develops Mary's voice as she ages, allowing listeners to revel in the languid hours spent in the library at Pemberley, where her sister Lizzie has settled with Mr. Darcy. It's there that listeners hear her awakening passion for writing, for romance, and for creating a world of her own.
Pub Date: July 24, 2018
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525631392
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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