Angel Pean sounds young, sweet, and tough as nails in her impressive narration of this second novel by the author of the Earphones Award-winning sci-fi debut THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS. Set on an alternate, perhaps future, Earth, where Wiley City residents guard their walled community from gritty Ashtown, this is both a thriller and social commentary. Scales is a mechanic and warrior who is trusted by Ashtown's emperor. When Ashtown residents start to be mysteriously murdered, she is tasked with stopping the crimes. Honeyed tones and audible bravado make Scales achingly real as she faces all manner of threats, which Pean performs with edge-of-your-seat pacing. A growling emperor, condescending scientist, straightlaced colleague, and other characters contrast evocatively with Scales, raising listeners' involvement with this fierce morality tale.
Pub Date: March 12, 2024
Duration: 15 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593823835
Publisher: Random House 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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