Kirby Heyborne expertly renders the isolation of a teenager who is falling apart in the midst of an icy winter landscape. In this reworking of HAMLET, Jesse Matson's father dies on a deer hunting trip in the snowy woods of Minnesota, and the death is ruled a suicide. After a ghostly visit, Jesse believes his Uncle Clay murdered his father and is in love with his mother. He vows retribution. Avoiding fake Minnesotan accents (thankfully), Heyborne creates authentic characters. Jesse is not particularly likable, but his anger and pain are palpable. Girlfriend Christine Montez, daughter of an immigrant baseball player with handy fists, is empathetic and honest. Jesse's dead father has a voice that is hollowed-out and haggard.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Books on Tape
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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