In this fine audiobook, Jill Archer refers to her two teenage sons as "wolves"--restless, often snappish, constantly hungry. Narrator Rebecca Lowman's performance is a strong one; her calm delivery bridges the gaps between Jill's philosophical patience and emotional frayed ends as she tries to care for the men in her life. When her husband is injured on a fishing boat and taken to Nova Scotia for treatment, Jill must tend the literal and psychological fires at their home in coastal Maine. Lowman keeps the plot from veering into melodrama with a kind, thoughtful tone, and she moves deftly from character to character. While some moments are better articulated than others, in large part due to nuanced narrative timing, this is well worth a listen.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593349540
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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