It's a long haul, reading an entire novel aloud. It takes concentration to keep disparate characters straight, to stay attuned to the rhythms of the story, to discern the emotional temperatures at every juncture. In this performance, David Daoust demonstrates just how difficult it is for a narrator to remain focused. Though he begins adequately in this thriller about the violence and corruption swirling around the Teamsters Local in New York, as the tapes proceed, he loses his way. He drops characterizations--a shame because he demonstrates a talent for the sounds of working-class Irish Americans--and his reading becomes increasingly wooden. He has a habit of accenting odd points in a sentence, which is irritating, and fails to pause between changes of scene, which is disorienting. This is a case where an engrossing story is ill-served by its reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2001
Duration: 14 hrs
Publisher: Brilliance 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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