An intriguing opening immediately sparks curiosity and captures attention when main character Leah tells us, "Once a week, I chase men who are not my husband. . . ." Narrator Kim Bubbs provides an intense listening experience of Callanan's cleverly plotted novel. When her husband, Robert, an author, disappears after purchasing a ticket to Paris, Leah and her two daughters uproot their lives in Wisconsin and head to the City of Light. Bubbs is particularly effective in delivering Leah's wry observations as the little family finds itself, first, living above and, then, purchasing and operating a failing bookstore. Children's classics MADELINE and THE RED BALLOON, both set in Paris, work as metaphors for the differences between Leah and Robert as Bubbs keeps Callanan's plot twists and discoveries fresh and satisfying.
Pub Date: April 3, 2018
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525527558
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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