Frankie Corzo beautifully narrates most of this audiobook as she portrays 30-year-old Monica Campo, whose world implodes when she finds herself pregnant from a rebound relationship. Corzo aptly infuses her performance with angst. Portraying Monica's mother, Mirta, Yareli Arizmendi captures a woman in ill health whose long-held secret upends her family, especially Monica. Arizmendi gives the Cuban matriarch the perfect accent and deep pitch. Corzo's youthful voice conveys the emotional journey Monica goes through as she tries to figure out how to deal with her pregnancy while coping with her mother's precarious health and delusional ramblings. Arizmendi uses cadence and tone to convey the confusion and desperation Mirta feels as she tries to communicate her secrets to her family while coping with a serious illness.
Pub Date: July 9, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781797179001
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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