Narrator Sophie Amoss excels in portraying Libby, a 15-year-old girl left to deal with the consequences after her mother rashly ejects her 12-year-old sister, Ellen, from the family car on a rural road five miles from home. When Ellen attempts to hitch a ride home, a disastrous event occurs that reverberates throughout Libby's family. Amoss capitalizes on the story's evocative language, setting, and strong characters. She has a special ability to provide the large cast with well-differentiated voices. The siblings are given youthful voices that make their worries apparent as they deal with men who may or may not have their best interests at heart. This is an atmospheric and moody coming-of-age story that looks at the results of one unfortunate act and its ensuing costs.
Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063049888
Publisher: Harper 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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