When a nice Midwestern mom loses pound after pound, devours carrot sticks, shuns Fritos, and quits baking cookies for her four sons, it could be a sign of impending disaster. Narrator Emily Ellet introduces listeners to Jackie, who revels in her new thin, seductive body. Ellet's Jackie has an earthy, insouciant personality. The story is about two next-door families who are caught up in murder, guilt, and grief. Each affected family member is featured and their reactions presented. There are numerous characters, but some voices do stand out, namely those of the nearly childlike Ceci, the victim's daughter; the sweet yet soporific prison psychologist; and Sammy, the barely functional youngest of Jackie's sons. Numerous sex scenes are more monotonous than erotic.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781666649536
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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