OF BEES AND MIST

Meridia suffers through an emotionally impoverished childhood with noncommunicative parents. Narrator Marguerite Gavin's crisp tones convey Meridia’s upper-class home, where what little tenderness she manages to garner comes only from her nanny. Varying her pace to characterize a wide range of characters, Gavin carefully portrays Meridia’s impervious father, breathily distracted mother, and germaphobe nurse. Gavin accurately captures Meridia’s confusion at the behavior of the adults who fail to fulfill her emotional needs and depicts her shyness and isolation, in particular, through the numerous rhetorical questions she wonders about but never actually asks. Gavin's performance amplifies the mysterious and ironic undertones of the story. M.R. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2009]