Narrator Caitlin Kelly fills each character's voice with personality in this audiobook. The story moves from 1997, when a terrible tragedy changes the life of free-spirited Zinny, to a period 20 years later. Now known as Ginny, she is once again facing a life-changing disaster, even as old secrets demand an honest reckoning. Kelly gives Zinny a perky voice, while Ginny speaks in a mature, measured tone. Daughter Avery echoes young Zinny's voice. Mother Adela, even as her health deteriorates, has a voice dripping with arrogance as she spins events and uses power without apology. Best friend Kirsten, the queen bee in high school, still has a snarky voice. As portrayed by Kelly, brother Trevor, first love Gray, nerdy friend CJ, and husband Harris add spice to the mix.
Pub Date: May 12, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062844538
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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