A powerful, engaging listen with characters whom listeners won't be able to forget.
This compelling Depression-era story is about Meg Lefleur, an abandoned orphan, and two fiercely independent women whose lives collide in 1930s Mississippi. The audiobook shines because of the dual narration by Jenna Lamia and January LaVoy. Lamia brings warmth and emotional vulnerability to the younger characters, while LaVoy performs the adults with wit and presence, including main characters Birdie and Charlie. Both women are at a crossroads, trying to take care of the people they love despite the challenges they face. With a wide range of memorable characters, the novel balances loss, sadness, humor, and social commentary with the rich Southern atmosphere. Lamia and LaVoy create distinct personalities and rhythms that feel immersive despite the length of the audiobook.
A powerful, engaging listen with characters whom listeners won't be able to forget.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
Duration: 28 hrs, 39 mins
DD ISBN: 9798347810307
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks
Review Posted Online: today
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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