This audio collection of short stories looks at young adults or teens dealing with diverse emotional issues. The various narrators--from Cassandra Campbell to Kirby Heyborne--read the collection in such a cohesive manner that it's almost as if there were just one narrator. Each narrator conveys the feelings of teenaged angst, the confusing issues of sexuality and promiscuity, and the despair of abandonment and betrayal--all while adding the eerie undercurrent that something isn't quite right. And sure enough, though it's sometimes confusing, something isn't right! Every story contains a supernatural aspect--which is sometimes a little amusing but often very creepy and unsettling. The many different voices add interest, but no single performance stands out. Perhaps this is the intention for the purpose of creating a consistent listening experience.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780553399554
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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