Narrator Joniece Abbott-Pratt's sweet voice and vibrant characterizations entice listeners into this first novel by bestselling writer Morgan Jerkins. Known for her memoirs and essays, Jerkins here blends magical realism and a story about the challenges faced by contemporary Black women. Harlem's Melancon women survive by selling pieces of their life-giving caul to white people who can pay well. A multigenerational crisis ensues when they refuse to help Laila, a local Black woman who has suffered numerous pregnancies. Abbott-Pratt changes her pitch atmospherically as she shifts between the Melancons' gothic domain, Laila's increasingly unhinged desperation, and the bright pace of Laila's niece, Amara, a law school student. Abbott-Pratt's melodic tone is an engrossing through line in this ambitious novel about gentrification, exploitation, generational trauma, and Black identity.
Pub Date: April 6, 2021
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780063070431
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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