SNOW IN AUGUST

In fairness, no reader could rescue this maudlin, ultimately juvenile work of fiction. The story, which concerns the relationship between a fatherless Irish-Catholic boy in post-WWII Brooklyn and a rabbi survivor of the Holocaust, is insipid and replete with caricature. Unfortunately, Mitchell only compounds the deficiencies. He is a stilted reader whose attempts at accents--Irish, Yiddish and Brooklyn--are uniformly unconvincing or worse. He gives Southerner Red Barber a bad New York twang and manages to butcher one or two Hebrew pronunciations. His performance is nearly as embarrassing as Hamill's. M.O. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 00]