Music Man

Beautiful story read with tremendous skill

Reviewed: 03-23-25

Ann Patchett is an expert storyteller, and this is might be my favorite of all her books. As for Meryl Streep: it doesn’t get better than this. Characters, rhythm, pacing: perfect.

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Loved it. Perhaps not for everyone.

Reviewed: 07-29-22

This book will divide readers. An adventure novel it is not. But for the right person, it is a deeply satisfying read, a brilliant and touching meditation on the most important things in life. I loved it, and Hillary Huber reads it with stunning grace.

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2 people found this helpful

Well-written potboiler

Reviewed: 07-02-22

Nicely executed book, intelligent if not life-changing. Very well read, and a good enough story to hook you in.

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Great book, not great reader

Reviewed: 06-24-20

Horowitz has written a fascinating book— a must for anyone interested in Gershwin, opera, film, theater, American cultural history. But it’s hard to listen to Stephen Bel Davies stumble over so many words—many proper names are mispronounced, even terms like “recitative” and “chiaroscuro.” Horowitz deserves better. But I still got a lot out of “On My Way” and would recommend it, with that one caveat.

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2 people found this helpful

Fascinating

Reviewed: 01-07-17

Tana French has the power of invention, and she's a colorful, elegant writer. She gets you to accept some dicey, unexplained plot premises through sheer force, intelligence, and skill. She also creates a vivid, sympathetic gallery of characters. Like "In the Forest," "The Likeness" is a bit overwritten, and leads to another solved-but-botched dénouement. I'm kind of hooked on her, but wish she'd write one with a more satisfying conclusion. I enjoyed this book and its excellent performance a great deal. However, I am still scratching my head about it.

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Elegant but tedious stuff

Reviewed: 11-23-16

"Scoop" reads like P. G. Wodehouse with severe indigestion. Waugh is an expert writer but I found the story somewhat irritating, a fish-out-of-water saga without enough humanity to keep me engaged. The reader is a fine, nuanced actor. He reads a bit too quickly, perhaps making the book seem more trivial than it might otherwise. Based in "Scoop," I'm not tempted to explore more early Waugh.

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4 people found this helpful

Elegant and elusive

Reviewed: 09-01-15

I understand why other writers prize James Salters as a novelist. His scenes are vivid, evocative, and also oblique. There is a fascinating combination of detail given and fact withheld. Like Proust, he tells you a lot--but leaves out a lot as well. His prose recreates the feeling of certain friendships: colorful and engaging in the moment, and then somewhat puzzling in the aftermath. Yet the characters take on so much life in Salter's masterful hands. I greatly enjoyed "Light Years": arty but not arch, poetic but not self-indulgent--nothing goes on too long, everything proportionate. And no one writes similes like Salter. I reveled in it, but readers who are in search of straightforward, page-turning narrative could get frustrated This is literary fiction of the highest quality.
The narrator Mark Boyett, is very good in all the important ways--his rhythm is just right, he evokes the different characters (with their many foreign accents) nicely, and he doesn't moon over the lyrical sections. My only gripe is that he mispronounces foreign words from time to time, a pet peeve of mine: he says "restina" for "retsina," for example, puts the wrong accent on the Italian word "facile..." You get the picture. It's a small blemish on a fine achievement. Boyett found the right tonality for this delicate novel, which I would not have thought conducive to an audiobook.

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10 people found this helpful

First-class thriller

Reviewed: 05-15-15

Delivers exactly what I want from this genre--smartly written, beautifully paced. The three readers are excellent. Also an interesting portrayal of an alcoholic's experience of daily life.

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Brilliantly written, perfectly read

Reviewed: 03-07-15

I enjoy most of McEwan's novels a great deal. This one is a beauty--yes, very internal, but so beautifully observed and totally absorbing. The performance by Lindsay Duncan struck me as ideal, with only a couple of technical glitches where two short sections got repeated. A minuscule blemish on a fine achievement.

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Fascinating novel, brilliantly performed

Reviewed: 07-21-14

This novel won the Booker Prize, and I can understand why. It has a very compelling narrative arc--it actually juggles three plot lines simultaneously--and Atwood's command of language is dazzling. Her turns of phrase, metaphors, and descriptions catch you off guard with their out-of-kilter clarity. (This is a book you want to quote.) She is able to paint characters of great complexity, to talk about sexual intimacy with frankness, to engage the reader as both storyteller and social historian. I was drawn in from the very beginning and had that delicious "book sadness" when it was over. Given that there is a story within the story, and another story within the subsidiary story, it might have been a less than ideal candidate for audio presentation. But Margot Dionne is one of the finest readers I have encountered yet, on a par with Prunella Scales and Simon Vance. Utterly fluent with the prose, she is able to give each character an immediately recognizable voice--cadence, timbre, accent. She made this multi-faceted book clear at every point. I have read some complaints about the recorded sound. No, it was not done in a quiet digital studio, but I had no issues with the continuity, the occasional background noises (birds chirping quietly at one point), the bit of hiss in the playback. If anything, it suited the material perfectly. This beautiful novel is in the best possible hands. Highly recommended.

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1 person found this helpful