Offbeat and honest, this is literary fiction at its best.
Levine’s newest novel follows know-it-all Rose, who convinces her brother to allow her to babysit her 6-year-old nephew, Nathan, while he’s away on vacation. Rose has high expectations for her week with Nathan until a tragic incident at the park somehow transfers the soul of a corgi named Hazel into Nathan’s body. Rose scrambles to release Hazel from Nathan’s body before his parents return. Lisa Flanagan perfectly embodies Rose, highlighting her haughtiness and impatience but also clearly expressing how Rose’s eccentricities and constant unsolicited advice hide her insecurities and loneliness. Flanagan’s portrayal of Nathan is spot-on as the charming child grows attached to Hazel even while he’s confused by his aunt’s actions.
Offbeat and honest, this is literary fiction at its best.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
Duration: 5 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668162514
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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