• The Emperor's Children

  • A Novel
  • By: Claire Messud
  • Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
  • Length: 18 hrs and 35 mins
  • 3.2 out of 5 stars (323 ratings)

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The Emperor's Children  By  cover art

The Emperor's Children

By: Claire Messud
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
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Publisher's summary

Two-time PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Messud is hailed as "a writer of enormous skill and stylistic grace" by Publishers Weekly. This wonderfully crafted comedy of manners was called a "stinging portrait of life among Manhattan's junior glitterati" in a starred review by Kirkus Reviews.

Friends at Brown University, Marina, Danielle, and Julius are still looking to make their marks as they approach their 30s. Marina lives with her celebrated parents on the Upper West Side while trying to complete her book. TV producer Danielle's success is due to the puff pieces she churns out. Freelance critic Julius can barely make ends meet. Into this mix comes Bootie, Marina's college dropout cousin, who is just the catalyst the three friends need to start making significant changes in their lives.

©2006 Claire Messud (P)2006 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Tangy dialogue, provocative asides, glittering imagery, and nimble postulations build toward an electrifying and edifying conclusion." (Booklist)
"Her writing is so fluid, and her plot so cleverly constructed, that events seem inevitable, yet the narrative is ultimately surprising and masterful as a contemporary comedy of manners." (Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about The Emperor's Children

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 3 out of 5 stars
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    55
  • 4 Stars
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  • 3 Stars
    73
  • 2 Stars
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  • 1 Stars
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Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
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    34
  • 3 Stars
    14
  • 2 Stars
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Story
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
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    28
  • 4 Stars
    25
  • 3 Stars
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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

This is a best seller?

What a waste of my ears. I downloaded this book after reading glowing reviews of a work about post 9/11 life. It was an exercise in narcissism. The characters are self absorbed and though endlessly analyzing their own lives, have no real contact with the world outside of their egos. They go nowhere and do nothing, even as a collective tragedy occurs on their doorsteps.

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11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Talk about the

The narration was good, but the book is not one that I can recommend. The characters, with the exception of one or two minor characters, were incredibly self-involved and annoying. I listened to the end, merely because I wondered if there would be any positive resolution to any of the story lines--there wasn't. It is difficult to care about the characters when they are so unlikeable. Although spouting rhetoric about the value of social conscience, none of the major characters acted in ways to support the rhetoric. The one character who did act responsibly (Marina's mother), was unfathomable to her family.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Suzanne Toren a makes a good book great

The terrific performance by Suzanne Toren made this good book great. She doesn't merely read the book, she breathes life into each character. Each person is utterly distinct and vivid. I'd like to recomment this book to my book group, but only if they listened to this version instead of reading it!

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Great Book/Lame Director

I loved the book but wasn't crazy about the narrator. I really wanted a simpler, less obvious reading of what is a morally and intellectually complex story. I felt as though the reader didn't quite trust the writing to speak for itself so added unnecessary embellishment.

I felt that several of her characterizations were really heavy-handed. Instead of trusting the listener to determine a character's strengths and weaknesses she seemed determined to telegraph them for us.

Ultimately this overwrought interpretation rests squarely on the director's shoulders. It is the director's job to help the actor temper her reading. Because he didn't do this, the reader got in the way of the beautiful narrative flow of this magnificent novel.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Woes of the over-privileged

3.5, really.

None of the central characters in The Emperor's Children are very likable people, though they aren't portrayed without some sympathy. Murray Thwaite is an egotistical, two-faced ivy tower intellectual used to being fawned over by the media. His overindulged daughter, Marina, is "taking a year off" for a fatuous writing project, but is barely working on it. She gets involved with Ludovic Seeley, an ambitious, Machiavellian Australian who intends to launch a magazine. Murray's nephew, Bootie, cultivates a creepy, parasitic idealism reminiscent of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces.

Messud takes her unpleasant cast and sets their lives in speeding motion, like billiard balls on a table, gleefully letting them race towards their inevitable collisions. Later in the book, the September 11 attacks occur, creating their own complications in everyone's lives -- which have little to do with the death and destruction, of course. It's a scathing glimpse at the underside of the privileged NYC elite, focusing on their self-absorption and sense of entitlement, and it's hard not to watch their struggles and falls.

To be fair, though, the characters are a bit caricatured, offering little to redeem the liberal intelligentsia, and not reflecting much that's positive about any other way of being. I often pitied these flawed people, sometimes identified with them, and half wanted to see them get their well-deserved comeuppance, but are they really the reality?

Still, I enjoyed this book and its plotting. If, like me, you're an urban dweller who sometimes find yourself at cocktail parties with people from this world, you might get something out of this scathing drama of its aspirants and pretenders.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Read Reviews Before Buying

This was one of those "why did I choose this?" selections for me. The majority of reviews state it like it is: a bunch of young adults whining about their sorry self-fulfilled lives. If that is your thing, go for it. But I need something a little more solid.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

18 Precious Hours For This?

If you like whining, self-involved people with delusions of grandeur who do not even remotely evolve in any significant way despite living in the center of the earth shattering events of 9/11, then this book is for you. Ginger, from Vallejo was absolutely correct in her review. I decided recently to attempt to read or listen to every critically acclaimed book from 2006 which is why I purchased this pointless waste of time in the first place. It was well narrated and stylistically well written, but why it is so popular with the critics is far beyond me. You want to read or listen to a great and well received book from 2006, then download "Special Topics In Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl (don't let the wordy and scattered prologue turn you off.. stick with it. It turns out to be absolutely fabulous) or one that received hardly any recognition at all "The Divide" by Nicholas Evans. Both of these books are wonderful, and once I completed them I felt my time and money had been well spent.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Not all it is cracked up to be!

Not a bad book but this story has no point and in the end I was disappointed with the time I spent listening to the book.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Whining 20 somethings

This story has no point and in the end I was disappointed with the time I spent listening to the book. The characters wander aimlessly for too long, then just when you expect there to be some big event/blowup or closure (the affair is discovered, he really did marry her to get at her father, etc.) the book just ends. I don't know if the writer is also of this generation, but it felt like she struggled to write a book with any meaning, just as Marina couldn't pull her book together. It left me wondering if the author was describing her own unfulfilling life. The original setup of characters and situations had so much potential, but the end left me flat. For the last hour of the book (at least), I wanted to slap all 4 characters, the 3 friends and the cousin, and say 'grow up and dump this illusion that you have to 'be somebody' or do something 'significant' and be noticed and get on with your life'.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Difficult Listen

I did not enjoy this book at all. The narrator was haughty and synical sounding. As far as the book itself, I thought the character development was lacking. I'm not sure if that was due to listening rather than reading but in any event I felt it was a waste of time listening to.

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2 people found this helpful