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Two newly released audiobooks just completed: Megan Abbott's Beware the Woman, narrated by Brittany Pressley, and T.J. Newman's Drowning, narrated by Steven Weber and Laura Benanti.
Megan Abbott is one of my favorite authors, but Beware the Woman missed the mark for me; I appreciated it more than I liked it. It was a departure for Abbott, who started out writing feminine noir, then shifted to the world of teenage girls and female rivalries, and in this book has written a gothic about a pregnant woman and her husband visiting her father-in-law in a cottage in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, without wifi or cell service. Add in an enigmatic Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper, a roaming mountain lion, and the requisite secrets and lies. I should have loved it, but ...
Drowning, though, was loads of fun: Airport meets The Poseidon Adventure. Soon after takeoff, a commercial plane crashes into the Pacific; most of the passengers meet a fiery death while trying to escape into the water, but a dozen people remain as the aircraft sinks to the bottom, struggling to cope and hoping for rescue. Stock characters in the plane include plucky little girls, a sweet elderly couple, and a troublemaking jerk, and on land we had the one person with a risky rescue plan (who just happened to be the wife of of the the trapped passengers!). It was hokey and derivative and melodramatic, and I enjoyed every minute.
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