Narrator Barrie Kreinik enlivens a rather flat, predictable story about three sisters whose lives are turned upside down by the death of their mother. Listeners spend hours learning about the women's material and sexual desires, their career and marital insecurities, their paltry anxieties, and, of course, their relationships with each other. There are some memorable portrayals in this lengthy production. The soft, gentle voice of the masseuse in Duluth; the raspy timbre and Down East accent of grande dame Deirdre, who lives on Mount Desert Island, Maine; and the South Carolina drawl of ex-con and heartthrob C.J. Reynolds invigorate this production. Some listeners will feel they are enjoying a heartwarming family drama. Others may find the characters lackluster despite a more than competent rendering.
Pub Date: June 7, 2022
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250835543
Publisher: Macmillan 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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