Alyssa Bresnahan narrates the second story of Naomi, an investigator who specializes in finding missing children. Naomi has an almost blind determination to locate her own missing sister, and Bresnahan infuses her character with the desperate tenacity that engulfs her life and threatens her marriage. Naomi befriends a homeless street kid, a girl named Celia, who imagines that butterflies are her protectors. Bresnahan delivers Celia's visions of butterflies with gentle awe. The author respectfully presents the wretchedness of street life, including drug addiction and sexual abuse, and Bresnahan's well-paced narration honors that tone. The listener can find hope in the relationships between the street kids and the adults fighting to protect them.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062958228
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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