Gisela Chípe and Liliana Montenegro provide nuanced alternating narrations in this contemporary audiobook about a strained mother-daughter relationship. Chípe portrays 30-something Monica Yolanda Flores, who shares a Brooklyn apartment with her recently widowed Peruvian-born mother, Paula. Chípe adeptly conveys Flores's sorrow and longing for deeper connections beyond her friendships at her finance job. Montenegro employs a mature, sensible tone for Paula, who is finding her feet at her job at a dollar store and in a possible relationship with an old friend, who is married. The transitions between the first-person perspectives of Flores and Paula are eased by the narrators' relaxed pacing. After the novel's early focus on workplace environments, patient listeners will discover the complexities of Flores and her mother's history and present life.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780063272521
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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