In Shakespeare’s play, all we know of the world’s most famous star-crossed lovers happens over a period of five days. Lois Leveen’s imaginative retelling covers all the years before—from the nurse’s point of view. Nicola Barber delights with her full-bodied, earthy performance of Angelica and her lusty husband, Pietro. When Angelica’s baby daughter dies in childbirth, Friar Lorenzo helps her become live-in wet nurse to the Cappaletta’s newborn girl. Angelica becomes irrationally devoted to Juliet, convinced that she’s truly her baby, switched at birth. Barber portrays aged Lord Cappaletta’s disappointment at not having a son and is convincing as Lady Cappaletta is driven to the edge of madness. She handles Elizabethan morés, beekeeping secrets, and hot-blooded teens engaged in an ancient feud with quicksilver vocal shifts. Wonderful listening.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781442376335
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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