Barbara Rosenblat is exactly the right narrator for Laurel Schmidt's seriocomic vision of the afterlife. Frances Beacon, bestselling author of SEX, DRUGS, AND SOCIAL SECURITY, finds herself dead at age 65. Rosenblat is wonderful at conveying Frances's initial confusion and then disbelief at finding herself in some kind of way station between life and death. She excels at Frances's snarky attitude as she tries to make sense of what's happening. As Frances's past lives are revealed and she continues to resist retraining at the University of the Afterlife, where she's expected to learn how to be dead, Rosenblat enters into each scene with enthusiasm, sometimes making laugh-out-loud observations, sometimes tugging at one's heartstrings. Overall, an entertaining listening experience performed by an outstanding narrator.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 13 hrs
Publisher: Laurel Schmidt
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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