The people, plants, landscapes, and histories of Hawaii come alive in this collection of short stories. Jennifer Robideau narrates with a light touch and minimal character voices, choosing instead to provide a welcome continuity of tone across the stories. Through her characters' intimate relationships with each other and their home places, Rigg explores the legacy of colonialism and tourism in Hawaii, as well as the legacies of resilience, resistance, and love. Robideau narrates a story about an older man who is looking back on his life, a teenage girl who is discovering herself, a 20-something who is returning home after a long absence, and more. Her smooth, unobtrusive narration makes this an easy and enjoyable listen, and her careful attention to Hawaiian place names and other words reflects the care and love Rigg put into these works.
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
Duration: 6 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063419995
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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