Inspired by the real-life female journalists and photographers who defied convention during World War II, the story follows two Americans, Jane and Liv, and their British male counterpart, Fletcher, as they race across France during the summer of 1944 to be the first to cover the Allied invasion of Paris. Told in short chapters, the story moves quickly; however, narrator Jennifer Ikeda doesn't rush. Her careful inflections conveys a range of emotions, from resolute determination to trembling fear, that ensure the characters' experiences aren't overshadowed by the painstaking historical detail, including harrowing descriptions of war. While her French pronunciation is flawless, Ikeda's other accents, particularly for male voices, veer toward caricature. Fortunately, this is only slight distraction in an overall satisfying listen of unsung history.
Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2015
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781490683911
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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