An exploration of academia and identity through a feminist lens.
This novel is both a commentary on the current state of academia and the story of a woman trying to control her own narrative. Suehyla El-Attar Young voices Sam, an adjunct professor at a public university in Baltimore. When she takes on additional courses at a liberal arts school nearby, she is unexpectedly put in direct contact with her former grad school advisor, with whom she shares a questionable past. Listeners will be immersed in Sam's attempt to define herself while balancing the precarious reality of a career as an adjunct. Young does an excellent job of conveying Sam's frustration, confusion, and determination with both humor and heart.
An exploration of academia and identity through a feminist lens.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
Duration: 10 hrs, 27 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668129821
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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