Narrator Jean Ann Douglass captures ups and downs and contradictions of contemporary life in these short stories by Bynum. Douglass excels in conveying the self-deprecating, guilt-ridden interior monologues of the suburban moms who are the main characters in many of these narratives. Douglass's tone and pitch are easy on the ears, so the stories whiz by in segments of around 30 minutes. Listeners will laugh out loud at Douglass's ability to capture characters' reactions to mundane phenomena like the price of souvenirs at a school fair and the agony of decision making behind tween Instagram posts. As a whole, the stories feel light and airy, yet the insights they offer on contemporary life linger after the volume has ended.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250776570
Publisher: Macmillan 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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