Narrator Cherise Boothe has her hands full with this story set aboard an interstellar ark for humanity. The HSS MATILDA has the class structure of the pre-Civil War South, with overseers on the upper decks and sharecroppers down below. With each section having its own patois and the rulers their own stiff language, Boothe must juggle a dozen different accents and dialects, and she does so with ease. Aster, the novel’s protagonist, is an outsider even among her own on the lower decks, a scientist and assistant to the surgeon. Thanks to Boothe, the listener can distinguish which of Aster's gaggle of roommates and relatives is speaking at any point and cheer her as she struggles to break free of her cage.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
Duration: 12 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781538475010
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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