This audiobook presents unsparing parallel portrayals of a mother and her daughter: Elsie, whose rocky relationship with an Albanian immigrant leads to pregnancy, and Luljeta, her daughter. Now age 17, Luljeta is struggling to come to terms with who she is after realizing she will not be able to escape her hardscrabble town of brass mills just yet. The dual narrations of Lauren Fortgang and Thérèse Plummer vividly depict both the down-on-its-luck town and its hardworking residents, including the Albanian immigrants who are attempting to reconcile their difficult past while forging a new life in America. Elsie's narration is more nuanced, while Luljeta's reflects her adolescent angst. Accents for the Albanian characters help to add dimension to this story of struggle and the search for belonging.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525524557
Publisher: Random House 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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