Ona Vitkus is 104 years old and something of a loner. Narrator Chris Ciulla adopts a slight accent to illustrate her Lithuanian roots and adds a slight tremulousness to his timbre so that Ona sounds old but still spry and spirited. Ona forms a friendship with an 11-year-old Boy Scout who is assigned to do chores on her property. The boy is obsessed with Guinness records and talks her into trying to become the oldest person in the world. Ciulla's open performance and slightly hurried pacing for the boy perfectly translate his unfiltered but sweet nature. After the boy dies, his father, Quinn, an itinerant musician, takes over the chores. Ona and Quinn's unlikely bond helps Quinn understand his unusual son. Quinn didn't always fulfill his parental responsibilities but Ciulla makes his fundamental decency and kindness clear to the listener.
Pub Date: April 12, 2016
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781520003801
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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