Narrator Kimberly Farr's gentle, measured performance is perfect for this family saga, which is replete with secrets and dysfunctional relationships. The story starts in the near future, after climate change has hit its tipping point, and then moves back in time before returning to the beginning. This audiobook is also a commentary on environmental issues and the complex ways that four generations of the Greenwood family depend on trees and forests--as livelihood, solace, and identity--for more than a century. Farr's personable delivery paints vibrant portraits of the fully realized characters, strengthening listeners' empathy for their flaws and intentions. At the same time, she allows listeners to form their own opinions about them and the choices they make during times of economic and ecological change.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
Duration: 18 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593150283
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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