Narrator Reuben Uy brings life to a Filipino mother-and-son duo who are “hiding and hiding.” The story is told through the point of view of prodigal son, Excel, who returns to his mother’s cramped California apartment after a brief stint in a desert town, where he’d hoped to reinvent his life after spending so much of it trying to hide his undocumented status. Uy attends to the emotional dynamics between Excel, who never speaks above a whisper, and his larger-than-life mother, Maxima, a retired actress who scams lonely men online. Throughout, Uy deftly embodies diverse characters—from a Serbian grandpa who works with Excel to a string of Maxima’s “boyfriends.” Along the way, he gets listeners to care about what will happen next to this quirky, loving immigrant family.
Pub Date: July 7, 2020
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063006164
Publisher: Harper 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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