Narrator Lisa Renee Pitts narrates this postapocalyptic novel with feeling. When an epidemic wipes out most of the world, killing those over the age of 19, Ice Cream Star is left to roam a ruined American with her tribe of children The group forages for food in trash and finds anything they can use in the remains of buildings. As narrator, Pitts faces considerable challenge. Ultimately, she's unable to make clearer the author's use of incomplete sentences, nonstandard grammar, and dialogue of broken English. Listeners who can move past the dialect will find the story of children surviving at world's end engaging as Pitts's melodic voice, full of warm undertones, brings them closer to the emotional core of Ice Cream Star's struggle for survival.
Pub Date: June 16, 2015
Duration: 26 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781504626071
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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