Narrator Eric Martin's deliberate narration makes listening to this unusual novel about life's challenges both intriguing and troubling. The story of Benjamin, an elderly father, and his estranged daughter, Helen, explores what happened when she disappeared in Mount Rainier National Park at the age of 11. Martin plumbs the crevices of the father-daughter relationship and also portrays the two vagabonds who helped search for Helen. Martin gives each character a different attitude, each of which listeners will find unsettling. As he uses his voice like a scalpel, he gently reveals layers of the truth about what happened. The twisted and worrisome plot shows the need for understanding and reconciliation, when called for, as expressed in Martin's smooth and thoughtful delivery.
Pub Date: April 19, 2022
Duration: 4 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781696607872
Publisher: HighBridge 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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