Robert Petkoff's narration keeps listeners engaged with Snowden Wright's nonlinear story. The novel covers three generations of the Forster family, beginning in the early twentieth century when Houghton Forster founds the incredibly successful PanCola Company. Petkoff channels the many characters in this convoluted, difficult-to-follow saga of yet another dysfunctional family. Most poignantly, Petkoff's Montgomery sounds successful and handsome, yet he makes listeners feel the pain of the character's heartbreak. His voice is appropriately snarky or cruel for twins Lance and Ramsey, and he never descends to stereotype for the voice of mentally challenged Harold. In a style blending fact and fiction, the audiobook spans a century of American social and cultural history while the thin plot circles around locating the secret recipe for PanCola.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062892096
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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