Narrators Wendy King and John McLain do fine work capturing the cadences and intonations of the sometimes-enigmatic characters in these linked stories. All but one of these fictions occurs in a frightening mythic construct called the Redoubt, loosely located in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The narrations are tricky as many of the characters talk and think in survivalist, militia-inspired, apocalyptic ways that could easily devolve into caricature. The able narrators ensure that they don't. Two production quibbles: Sometimes the stories almost slide together--blunt ending slamming into hard-edged beginning. Also, the opening story about a nineteenth-century loner who falls in love with a grizzly seems an off note in an otherwise engaging collection set in a dystopian West.
Pub Date: May 22, 2018
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781684412396
Publisher: HighBridge 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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