Kristen Sieh's bright, expressive tones enliven this quirky audiobook, set in 2019. Twenty-nine-year-old Darcy takes a leave from her actuary position and returns to her parents' home in small-town Massachusetts after her husband leaves her. Darcy is surprised to discover that her parents have moved to Arizona without telling her, so as not to upset her. She hunkers down in her parents' home, subsisting on canned food and baked treats left by a neighbor until her search for work forces her into the community. Sieh provides unique voices for every character, including various locals whose humorous posts on the community board are interspersed throughout. This whimsical story about learning to navigate life's uncertainties is well served by Sieh's enthusiastic and versatile performance.
Pub Date: March 28, 2023
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062959409
Publisher: Harper 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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