When Lois Clary, a Bay Area software engineer, becomes guardian of a unique sourdough starter, she’s drawn into the surprising underworld of artisan food producers and farmers’ markets. Narrator Thérèse Plummer’s lively performance highlights Lois’s cautious curiosity and delight of discovery as she transforms from non-cooking AI geek to sought-after baker. This quirky story is well served by Plummer’s enthusiasm, although her characterizations can sometimes sound forced, especially when portraying the brothers who give Lois the starter. The audiobook contains special bonus material, including samples of the haunting Magz music (written by the author) that helps Lois’s starter thrive. Ari Fliakos reads several supplementary emails from the high-tech food company that has an unrelenting and possibly nefarious interest in Lois and her starter.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781427289285
Publisher: Macmillan 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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