Multiple voices add interest to an otherwise unexpectedly tame story.
Russo returns to upstate New York in this audiobook, examining the long reach of one’s formative years. In a plainspoken voice, Zachary Chastain performs chapters from Tyler’s perspective as he returns to his hometown a rock star. Fred Berman develops a gruffer tone as Curt, the police chief who was once Tyler’s best friend, and Emma Ladji is a standout as Deb, a gifted police officer. The smaller roles of Beth and Everett are performed well by Leeanna Albanese and Matt Godfrey. All the narrators are adept at making dialogue flow naturally, as well as at maintaining a consistent pace throughout their sections. While the performances are fine, the novel itself offers little tension or depth.
Multiple voices add interest to an otherwise unexpectedly tame story.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
Duration: 7 hrs, 29 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217340231
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 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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