A splendid cast illuminates this little-known WWII-era history.
Three talented narrators convey the story of how hundreds of mixed-race children were adopted from post-WWII-era Germany in this historical novel. Karen Chilton evokes the determination and compassion of Ethel, a Black American military wife and journalist. When Ethel learns of mixed-race children living in orphanages because their German mothers couldn’t care for them, she starts writing articles, battling bureaucracy, and working to find homes for them. Ariel Blake’s youthful timbre captures 16-year-old Sophia’s efforts to succeed as one of the first Black students at an elite boarding school in 1965 and to learn the identity of her birth parents. Adam Lazarre-White superbly conveys the well of emotion that powers former Black American soldier Ozzie’s path to building a purposeful life.
A splendid cast illuminates this little-known WWII-era history.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
Duration: 14 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668115732
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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