As the Dust Bowl descends on Mulehead, Oklahoma, the Bell family struggles to maintain hope. Through Emily Sutton-Smith's narration, listeners experience the figurative and literal dust settling deep within the family members. Annie Bell and her 15-year-old daughter, Birdie, are moving on opposite trajectories. As the initially pragmatic Annie's optimism increases, Birdie's flighty romanticism descends into disillusionment. Sutton-Smith's portrayals of the characters are strong. Especially noteworthy is the soft, uncertain voice of Samuel Bell, the father, as well as that of young Fred, a mute asthmatic whose world turns on him. Through the Bells and other characters, Sutton-Smith delivers a portrait of yearning as penetrating as the dust storms she describes. While numerous obvious edits detract from the production, Sutton-Smith's performance triumphs.
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781504744676
Publisher: Blackstone 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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