Narrator Alex McKenna's husky voice is the perfect match for this coming-of-age story about a 22-year-old Midwestern woman who moves to New York City to begin her adult life. Tess doesn't know what she wants, but she's willing to embrace every opportunity with gusto, including her grueling job as a bus person in a famous Manhattan restaurant. McKenna's performance is infused with a magical mix of youth and naïveté, tempered by a toughness earned after a year in the city. Listeners will practically taste the briny oysters, feel the bubbles of champagne, and sense the pop of caviar between their teeth. McKenna projects a full range of nuanced emotions, augmenting the intimacy of Tess's journey to self-discovery and her survival in the often brutal restaurant world.
Pub Date: May 24, 2016
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780399566295
Publisher: Random House 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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