Alice Adams

Tarkington's story of ambition and delusion in an unnamed Midwestern town in the early twentieth century won a Pulitzer in 1922. It still packs a punch, though it hasn't aged as well as some other works of the period, for instance, the novels of Sinclair Lewis. Traci Svendsgaard makes unfortunate choices in her reading that do nothing to minimize the dated quality of the dialogue. For no discernable reason, she plays the characters with exaggerated Southern country yokel accents, such that "well" becomes "way-ell," and so forth. Flirty Alice is a complex character, but she's presented here like a music hall ingénue with a most irritating wheedle to her voice. The story wins over the performance, but it could have been better served. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine