Talented Barrie Kreinik narrates this complicated contemporary story about the hardships of the Connelly family. After their mother dies and their father abandons them, Geraldine, Eddie, and Tara are left to fend for themselves--far too early in their lives. The three siblings have deep loyalty to each other and attempt to protect each other from any more pain and disappointment. Kreinik has a keen ability to switch from the narrator to the unique voice of each character by using pacing and tone. Despite the novel's setting, there are no Irish accents. All the siblings have challenges, ranging from difficulty at work and a traumatic head injury to an eighteen-month prison term. As the secrets and shame in the family are uncovered, love and commitment are reaffirmed.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250899491
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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