Andrus Nichols and Caitlin Davies share the narration of this mother–daughter story, set primarily in Chicago in 1965. Nichols infuses her performance with a soft, dreamy quality, which is appropriate for jazz singer Naomi's memories of the postwar years, when she was forced to face the consequences of acting on her instincts. Davies's performance is more lively, befitting the chapters told from the perspective of 10-year-old Sophia. These two different approaches work well together, emphasizing the contrast between the ambitious yet dependent Naomi and the more practical but fearful Sophia as they face an uncertain future and prepare for Naomi's last gig at a run-down club. Listeners will be fully engaged by this story of church, sexuality, the pursuit of art, and the meaning of family.
Pub Date: July 1, 2014
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062332189
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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