An exceptionally assured first novel enhanced by a powerhouse performance.
Michael Crouch gives an emotionally resonant narration of this mesmerizing debut novel of first love. He conveys the precise and evocative prose with ease and varies his pace to mirror the increasingly gripping storyline. Seventeen-year-old Everett dreams of living his entire life on his family’s sheep farm after his high school graduation. He is captivated by newly arrived Mary, who wants to attend art college. Crouch creates fully-realized character portraits of this large cast, which includes Everett and Mary’s family, friends, and neighbors in their rural Michigan community. Listeners will be riveted by Crouch’s descriptive depictions of farm life as well as the emotional complexities of a memorable first love.
An exceptionally assured first novel enhanced by a powerhouse performance.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250435453
Publisher: Macmillan 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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