This fast-paced audiobook recounts the Oliver family's attempts to deal with the traumatic abduction of their eighth-grade daughter Meredith's classmate, Lisa. The well-developed characters--including Meredith's parents, Claire and Mark, and her brother, Evan--are portrayed with care and empathy by Madeleine Maby. Maby finds unique and appropriate voices for the adults and kids who are haunted by the tragic event. Creating humor and sympathy in a very human way, she strongly portrays the helplessness of all involved. Delivering the thoughts and feelings of Meredith and Claire, Maby encourages listeners to think about how mother and daughter view life and its unpredictable elements. Maby's well-paced reading and authentic emotions add vigor to the well-written story.
Pub Date: March 14, 2017
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508230335
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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