EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES

When socially isolated 34-year-old Edsel Bronfman accepts a telemarketer's offer for a weekend in Florida on the condition that he show up with a companion, all kinds of unexpected and lucky things occur. The audiobook's narration by David Aaron Baker is the luckiest, as he manages to personify the naïve and awkward Edsel without making us want to throttle him. Baker also channels a small-time hoodlum, a cigarette-voiced crazy mother, office workers, a gym-rat egomaniac, and a variety of young women. The women matter because despite his possible virginity, Bronfman wants his Florida companion to be a girlfriend, or at least a possible girlfriend. In between the quirkiness, Baker's pleasant timbre carries us smoothly from one amusing oddity to another. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2017]