January LaVoy narrates a chilling audiobook, complete with ghosts, madness, and secrets. LaVoy channels Sylvia Wren, a world-famous, reclusive Arizona artist. Currently, she's being hounded by a journalist who's threatening to reveal her real identity: She is the heiress to the Chapel Firearms fortune, Iris Chapel. One-upping the reporter, Sylvia writes her own memoir, offering a disturbing look at her childhood, her domineering father, and her emotionally broken mother. LaVoy navigates the backstory smoothly, becoming each of the six doomed sisters and their Cassandra-like mother, who foresees "something terrible" for her daughters if they marry: "The Chapel sisters: First they get married; then they get buried." LaVoy's intimate breathy tones create the perfect gothic ambiance. Her delivery of the chilling details keeps listeners on edge. Intensely satisfying.
Pub Date: May 17, 2022
Duration: 15 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780358578468
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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