Recently divorced, Olivia Reed takes her children to visit her Jersey Shore hometown before they start their new life in New York City. Karen White's well-paced reading adds to the misty feeling as the trip to the beach unleashes Olivia's memories of her 15-year-old self and the summer she discovered the truth about her parents and her own sometimes strange behavior. White transitions smoothly between the adult and teen Olivia, altering her intonations to reflect the character's stage of life. Bipolar disorder is central to this family story, and White's sensitive performance captures a wide range of moods as Olivia, her mother, and her son each battle his or her own version of the disease. Listeners will remember Olivia's coming-of-age story long after they've heard the last paragraph.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062337535
Publisher: Harper 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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