Natalie Naudus brings thoughtful gravitas to the narration of Kimiko Guthrie's debut, which depicts the collective trauma that the Japanese internment camps of WWII inflicted throughout generations of Japanese-Americans. Akiko "Jane" Thompson is at the center of this story, which alternates between the camps and present-day California. Jane has disconnected from her Japanese heritage, but when her life begins to disintegrate, she realizes she must confront the legacy of the camps if she is to heal. Naudus skillfully navigates between the novel's two time periods, employing a low, bleak tone to describe the camps and heightened emotionality when communicating Jane's increasing instability. Her characterizations are authentic and believable, and her ability to capture this novel's unsettling atmosphere sets this audiobook apart.
Pub Date: June 23, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781982676407
Publisher: Blackstone 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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