MRS. ADAMS IN WINTER A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon

In 1815, just as Napoleon was returning from Elba to renewed warfare, John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, traveled by coach from Russia to Paris to join her husband—an arduous, perilous trip. O’Brien uses her story as a framework for excursions in history, geography, and biography. Cassandra Campbell’s reading is clear and well paced, though something in her tone always sounds slightly querulous. Her German accent is overdone, but her French accent is mostly good. She sometimes mispronounces English; most annoyingly, she delivers every variant of “twenty” as “twenny.” Literate listeners will bark their shins on her mispronunciations too often to fully enjoy this interesting, if sometimes wandering, history. W.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2010]