A teenager living on an island otherwise inhabited by senior citizens struggles to understand her place in the world in this unique audiobook. Ayesha Antoine gives a charismatic but flawed performance as the novel's young narrator, known only as the Kid. The Kid's footloose and irresponsible parents leave her on Swan Island with her grandmother, who dies shortly after her arrival. A slight problem is that the novel is set in the United States, and Antoine, who is British, cannot sustain a believable American accent. This results in odd and distracting pronunciations throughout the audiobook. Nonetheless, Antoine effectively captures the protagonist's mix of teenage savvy and naïveté as she deals with being on her own. Antoine also breathes life into the island's quirky older residents.
Pub Date: June 25, 2019
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062891969
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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