In Alice Adams Booth Tarkington momentarily ceased his detached contemplation of the foibles of youth and wrote a highly subjective story of an American family. Without abandoning his great gift for exposing the comic details of adolescent behavior, he was able to regard Alice’s difficulties with interior sympathy and understanding.”

Tarkington’s story of ambition and delusion…still packs a punch.”

Over the pictures, the vases, the old brown plush rocking-chairs and the stool, over the three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy chair and the gray velure sofa—over everything everywhere, was the familiar coating of smoke and grime.... Yet here was not fault of housewifery; the curse could not be lifted, as the ingrained smudges permanent on the once white woodwork proved. The grime was perpetually renewed; scrubbing only ground it in.

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. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine