Avid readers of Wolitzer's work won’t be disappointed by this new audiobook. The subject matter is timely, and Rebecca Lowman's narration is perfect. Similar to Wolitzer's previous novel, THE INTERESTINGS, this piece follows a realistic cast of characters from youth to adulthood, capturing their trials and triumphs along the way, particularly from a feminist point of view. Lowman moves adeptly among all types of voices and situations, never slipping into melodrama or monotone. In fact, Lowman often crosses into that ineffable narrative zone wherein she herself disappears and the story alone takes center stage. There may be moments when the authorial tone tries too hard to convince us, but Lowman always returns the listener to an empathetic place with warmth and skill.
Pub Date: April 3, 2018
Duration: 14 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525528173
Publisher: Penguin 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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