In 1971 Omaha, Helene and Evelyn meet as their children marry. Mia Barron's detached voice sets the scene and then, almost magically, transforms into women full of personality. Barron takes us back to the '40s and '60s, which molded the women, and forward from the '80s to the 2015s. As the women continue their rivalries, competing for attention and love, Barron gives each her own snarky, judgmental voice. She gives Francie, the beloved granddaughter, a voice that matures as she grows from a child to a troubled teenager and to a contented middle-aged woman. Listeners hear how Evelyn's daughter, Ruth, is frustrated by her struggles to succeed, while Helene's son, Tom, is supportive. Silver shows how histories impact families' lives, relationships, and choices through generations.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781668120835
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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