Ten-year-old Jim is growing up in Aliceville, North Carolina, during the Depression with his mother and uncles. He learns about work, honor, family and friendship as he moves through his eleventh year. L. J. Ganser's narration, emotionally true without ever being sentimental, is perfectly suited to Earley's prose, which presents Jim's experiences and growth from the perspective of a child moving into adolescence. Ganser's skillful vocal characterizations are believable and true throughout. He uses cadence and pacing to convey regional speech, rather than an exaggerated "accent," and this makes all the difference. A perceptive story and insightful narration produce a memorable listening experience, ideal for family, young adult, and adult listening.
(Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selection)Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2000
Duration: 6 hrs
Publisher: Time Warner AudioBooks
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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