Bailey Carr gently narrates this dystopian audiobook. The corrupt U.S. Department of Balance carries out a form of law enforcement that endows people who commit crimes with extra shadows that warn people they encounter of their past transgressions. Kris is one such person, and so is her newborn daughter, whose birth mother, Kris's wife, died in childbirth. Kris feels unprepared to be a widowed parent facing a world full of prejudice. Carr voices Kris's grief with realism and depth, and expresses her pride in her daughter as she grows. Carr's voice for Kris's daughter is adorably youthful and strong; she never lets a cruel world dampen her spirit. Caught between grieving and trying to find joy despite a government that is watching their every move, these characters will resonate with listeners.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798212236898
Publisher: Blackstone 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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