Narrator Josh Bloomberg brings listeners a novel listening experience with a Chinese shoe factory as a backdrop. He portrays Alex Cohen, a 20-something Jewish American who is trying to live up to his family's legacy. Capturing Alex's lack of sophistication in a jovial tone, he plays up the stark juxtapositions in the first half of the story. As Alex begins to learn more about Ivy, one of the seamstresses in the factory, and the general abuse suffered by factory workers, Bloomberg's tone grows somber. Will Josh throw in his lot with Ivy and her compatriots? Or will loyalty to his family win out in the end? Bloomberg gives a sympathetic and warm depiction of a young, rebellious American coming to terms with a way of life he's not seen before.
Pub Date: June 5, 2018
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781488204739
Publisher: Harlequin 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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