Kira Fixx narrates this intimate queer coming-of-age novel with the perfect mix of wistfulness and straightforward brashness. Sixteen-year-old Shae falls in love with Cam, who radiates passion and determination. Within a year, Shae is pregnant, and Cam has decided to transition from male to female. Soon Cam is starting a new life away at college, while Shae sinks into opioid addiction. Fixx's narration, like Maren's prose, is bright, direct, and without fanfare. She sounds exactly like a teenager who is telling her story like it is, bouncing between youthful excitement, regret, and feeling overwhelmed. Her lilting voice and slight Southern accent evoke the West Virginia hills, where most of the novel takes place. This is a heartbreaking listen about love, addiction, and belonging.
Pub Date: May 21, 2024
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781643755670
Publisher: Hachette 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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