This audio production of Tom Perrotta's comic novel exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of full-cast audiobooks. The more accomplished narrators provide the satirical characterizations necessary for Perrotta's biting treatment of everyday anxieties, with Carrie Coon giving an exceptional performance as a frustrated housewife. That said, some classic pitfalls of amateur narrators, such as monotonous delivery of descriptive passages, allow sections of the audiobook to devolve into the very mediocrity on which Perrotta is commenting. Luckily, the cast prove diverse enough to carry the stragglers, helped along by Perrotta's natural wit. The result is a personable, albeit inconsistent, commentary on contemporary sexuality that is well served by its narrators.
Pub Date: 2017
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508232834
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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