Dakota Ray-Hebert's voice encapsulates Ruby with a tough edge, a big laugh, an occasional sneer, and underlying grief. Ruby is Cree and Métis but was adopted as a baby by a dysfunctional white family in Western Canada. The novel moves back and forth in time as connected stories recount the lives of Ruby's birth parents, grandparents, partners, and others. The changing time frames can become confusing but Ray-Hebert deftly adjusts her performance with subtle differences between peripheral characters and the bighearted and spirited woman at the center who is determined to find her family and cultural roots. Underlying Ruby's story are deep themes--intergenerational trauma, abusive boarding schools, a foster system that ignored the needs of Indigenous children, and unwed teenagers who were forced to give up their newborns.
Pub Date: April 12, 2022
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593556801
Publisher: Random House 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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