Strole's graceful performance lets this story of love, devotion, and control quietly bloom.
For much of this audiobook, college student Frances addresses her absent sister, Charley, and narrator Phoebe Strole captures her loss and longing well. As the novel opens, Charley has been gone for six years, and Frances begins a kind of quest to reclaim her sister, a talented dancer, from the distance that separates them. Strole maintains an air of naïveté even as Frances begins taking more risks in her pursuit. Dialogue flows naturally between all the characters, and Strole's pacing is alternately calm and tense, shifting as the plot requires. McCarthy's writing is often beautiful in its detailed descriptions, and Strole allows the lovely word choices to sing forth, providing a strong foundation even when the story is uneven.
Strole's graceful performance lets this story of love, devotion, and control quietly bloom.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217352081
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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