Narrator Kirby Heyborne brings unbeatable passion to this whimsical debut featuring 12-year-old Walter Lavender, Jr., whose motor speech disorder has left him insecure of his own speech, a trait Heyborne carefully navigates when creating Walter's voice. When the magical book that keeps his mother's bakery running goes missing, Walter uses his uncanny ability to find lost things to bring it home. Walter's journey unfolds in evocative parables, taking him across an idyllic New York City. He's guided by eccentric and chummy characters, for whom Heyborne provides engaging accents and pitches. Heyborne's heartwarming performance will delight listeners, thanks to the pure joy in his narration as he describes the delectable gourmet confections Keller imagines.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524775766
Publisher: Penguin 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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