Sammie, the protagonist of this audiobook about motherhood and marriage, is deeply unhappy. Narrator Kristen Sieh pours all of that malaise into her voice, which makes for an unforgettable, though often infuriating, character. Listeners get a front-row seat as Sammie's relationships with her wife, Monika, and son, Samson, become increasingly strained. In every scene, Sieh's voice perfectly mirrors Sammie's emotional state. It rings with pent-up anger in a confrontation with Samson and turns into a desperate whine during a fight with Monika. She voices Sammie's internal monologues with a quiet resignation that reflects the interiority of this novel. The complexity of Arnett's characters paired with the nuance of Sieh's narration makes for an audiobook about contemporary queer life that is riveting, sometimes comic, and unsettling.
Pub Date: June 1, 2021
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593412541
Publisher: Penguin 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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