LaVoy’s performance captures the swift emotional currents of complicated characters desperate to find...
January LaVoy passionately performs this novel of two women learning to navigate the challenges of motherhood and complicated marriages without losing themselves in the process. When Val leaves North Carolina to move closer to her best friend, Milly, she finds that her dream life in New York is not what she hoped it would be. LaVoy's narration skillfully dances between various accents and character work that fully embraces Val and Milly’s world. Alternating between memories of a tragic accident in France and life as new mothers, Val and Milly struggle with past resentments and current slights to discover what truly matters.
LaVoy’s performance captures the swift emotional currents of complicated characters desperate to find balance—and each other.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
Duration: 12 hrs, 17 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217338672
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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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