Those who listen to this audiobook will learn that Tolstoy was wrong when he said happy families are all alike. There are many kinds of happy families, and they appear in all sorts of configurations here. The novel's focus is on adoption and how it is a positive, uplifting choice for those concerned. The liquid, uplifting voice of Patti Murin tells the story of actress India Allwood, who becomes pregnant twice, both times placing her babies in homes of her choosing and then later in life adopting twins. There are many characters in this family chronicle, including teens and children, and Murin presents them believably. The tone of this story is lighthearted, though life's complications are not glossed over. At the end, listeners are treated to an enlightening conversation between the author and the narrator.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
Duration: 15 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781250332301
Publisher: Macmillan 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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