Whether you enjoy this gathering of Blumenthals, Erlands, and sundry in anticipation of the nuptials of Clem, Walter and Bennie Blumenthal's free-spirited daughter may depend on whether the author's naturally fluty voice is your cup of narrative tea. In imitators, it's a timbre that easily veers over the edge into the saccharine. But while Cohen's story is whimsical, it is far from syrupy. Her narration, once one settles into it, captures the whimsy while maintaining the edge that a story with themes of bigotry and belonging, transition and tradition, demands. Cohen's fine performance as Great-Aunt Gladys Erland, whose past and present are the twin pillars on which this story stands, should win over even the most reluctant listener.
Pub Date: May 14, 2019
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781984839435
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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