Jen Zhao delivers an insightful performance of this novel, which is structured around several family vacations. College sweethearts Keru and Nate have never fit in with their families and have made their own family with their sheepdog, Mantou. Cultural differences between Keru's cautious immigrant parents and Nate's boisterous American parents have created an additional fissure, so the families have taken up vacationing separately. When Keru and Nate meet a European family on vacation, they must reevaluate their feelings about their families and their marriage. Zhao's even-paced voice provides empathy and unexpected humor. Using Romanian, Chinese American, and Southern accents, Zhao breathes life into the characters. This contemplative novel is a quick, thought-provoking listen.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
Duration: 5 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593942673
Publisher: Penguin 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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