Edie Pritchard--beautiful and smart--has always been pursued by men, and more than once has disappeared from her old life to avoid them. Eventually, after running from her second marriage, Edie sees that her teenage granddaughter is falling into the same trap. Narrator Holly Palance employs the same smooth, gentle cadence for the narrative that she does for most of the characters' voices--a choice this listener usually enjoys, but one that seems unsuited to this dark story. Her pleasant cadence is easy on the ears but belies Edie's angst-ridden life. Palance subtly distinguishes the twin brothers-- introspective Deane, Edie's first husband, and smarmy Roy, who always loved her. Overall, the narration is well paced, but a bit too cheerful for its serious theme.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2020
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781662002434
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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