Pushkin and the Queen of Spades

By: Alice Randall

Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts

Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard educated, African-American professor of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro-football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even more distressing, however, is that her beloved son has just become engaged to a gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.

For Windsor, this is no laughing matter. Determined to get to the source of it, she embarks on a journey into her own rich past. As she moves ever closer to the secret that has cast a shadow over her life, she discovers that the half-lies she has fed her son don't add up to the beauty of the truth.

©2004 Alice Randall (P)2004 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"It's hard to imagine a better match of novel and narration than this sparkling, dynamic audio exploration of race, motherhood, literature, and identity. Pitts throws herself into this performance, and her energy, wit, and sass seem wholly in sync with a novel of astounding sophistication, insight, and surprise." (AudioFile)

"A stunningly gutsy, literate, and original novel...of parental love." (Los Angeles Times)

"Ruthless wit and riveting style." (O, the Oprah Magazine)

well its a book anyway

Argh. By the second half the book is pretty much unbearable. The main character isn’t likeable. I wish it was written from the son’s point of view, or the stripper; at least they seem nice. The narrator incessantly launches into irate tirades, intellectual pretentiousness, and overly sentimental self pity. There is no development or context to make most of the events in the book believable, you’re just supposed to believe them. The book reads with maybe a couple sentences of someone doing or saying something, and then these ponderous, overdramatized remarks purporting some great meaning and gravity—to every little thing, over and over. If the author is trying to evoke an insanely annoying woman who really needs to get over her brooding about her childhood and tremendous sense of being full of herself, then she did a good job. But is it something you want to spend hours listening to? My gosh, no.