Brittany Bradford tenderly narrates this speculative meditation on grief and family connections. Twins Olivia and Ayanna grow up physically together but ideologically separate. Olivia is raised by their staunchly Catholic mother, and Ayanna by their father, who worships a mysterious blue door--one of several that spontaneously appeared throughout the world decades before. Bradford embodies each of the girls with subtle differences in their speech and personalities, especially when they're speaking to each other. When a tragedy leaves Ayanna to navigate, first, college and, later, adulthood on her own, Bradford's tone shifts to account for the weight of her grief and guilt in both her dialogue and her thoughts. Listeners will be tantalized by the glimpses of what lies beyond the doors.
Pub Date: June 3, 2025
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063338005
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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