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A modern love story
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Sarah Dunn HighBridge Audio, $29.95 5.75 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 1565118596
All in the family
By Adriana Trigiani Random House AudioBooks, $24.95 5 hours abridged, CD, ISBN 073930366X
Talking salt
By Linda Greenlaw Brilliance Audio, $29.95 6 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 1593551037
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Nowadays, love and marriage don't necessarily "go together like and a horse and carriage," but you can't blame
a girl for hoping. Hoping is exactly what Alison, the disarmingly honest narrator of Sarah Dunn's charmingly honest
debut novel, The Big Love has been doing for
the last few years. Alison, a mostly lapsed evangelical Christian who doesn't know how to have casual sex casually, is far too intelligent, thoughtful and droll to be characterized as just another chick-lit loudmouth. When her live-in boyfriend leaves her (in the middle of a dinner party) for his old flame, this 30-something, who muses deeply on relationships, religion and questions of the heart, learns that being left-in-the-lurch can be a life—and love—enhancing experience. Reader Eliza Foss captures Alison's voice and sweet, courageous spirit.
Smart, ambitious Nella Castelluca is the compelling, gutsy star of Adriana Trigiani's latest novel,
The Queen of the Big Time, which Trigiani narrates in her warm, earthy voice. Nella is modeled on Trigiani's own paternal grandmother; her story is that of Italian immigrants making their way in the "land of opportunity." Nella had wanted to become a teacher, but in 1924 it wasn't easy for the middle daughter of a poor farming family to get an education. Instead, she went to work in the local blouse factory like so many other girls in the small Pennsylvania town of Rosetto. But, unlike the others, Nella ended up owning the factory. On the way to achieving the American dream, Nella had to juggle family, work, career and the search for true love—maybe the hardest thing of all to find. Authentic and affecting, this top-notch Trigiani tale takes you inside an Italian-American family and inside a woman's heart.
Linda Greenlaw, the only woman to captain a swordfish boat and one of the very few women to make it in
commercial fishing, describes herself as a proud fisherman (no, not fisherperson or fisherwoman) who lives
like a nomad, swears like a pirate, has an income that's sporadic at best and can look her best friend in
the eye and lie. She's also a best-selling author who can tell sea stories with the best of them. And that's
just what she does in
All Fisherman Are Liars: Tales from The Dry Dock Bar. On a blustery December afternoon Linda met her best friend and mentor, salt-encrusted curmudgeon Alden Leeman, for lunch. Over vino and vittles they began to swap sea stories. Other fishing pros joined in and the tales of bungles, bad weather, bad crews, narrow escapes and near disasters flowed until last call. Greenlaw proves again that she's a natural storyteller and a fabulous audio narrator as well.