Babycakes

By: Armistead Maupin

Narrated by: Alan Cumming

Narrated by Alan Cumming

""Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on."" —New York Times Book Review

The fourth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.

When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

Only Maupin

This wonderful col!section of lovable, dreadful characters are the special provenance is Armistead Maupin. If you laugh at and delight in them half as much as I, you will put this book on a special shelf of yout library.

Wonderful book

Classic Armistead Maupin, Babycakes is a wonderful book. The storyline takes you on outrageous twists and turns but all of it is believable because of Maupin's richly developed characters. Nothing about them is forced or stretched to fit the story, they are already more than enough.
While Alan Cumming narrates very well for the most part, his low voice does not lend itself to doing female voices. Most come across as caricatures, undermining the written strength of the characters. (They can also really grate on your nerves.) Don't give up on the book because of the performance, you'll miss out on so much more! (And take comfort in the fact that he doesn't narrate any other books in the series.)

Best so far

I read the whole series in high school in the 90s and am revisiting for the first time now. They're just as campy and fun as I remember. I thought Alan Cumming did a FANTASTIC job narrating this one. I was a big fan of Frances McDormand's reading and not crazy about Cynthia Nixon's, I think because the content is so soapy that Nixon's more sensitive reading renders it almost corny at times. I went in to this one skeptical because I typically don't love male narrators, but in my opinion, Cumming's interpretation is perfect. There's a lot of variation between the characters and I think he reads with the appropriate amount of levity for the material. I thought he pulled off the American accents very convincingly, and I'm grateful that they hired a British actor since there are almost as many British characters in this book as American.
I really have no criticism of the story or the performance. I think this is my favorite of the first four Tales of the City books, especially now that I myself am middle aged and can relate to the existential dread the characters experience far better than I could in my teens ;)

I ordinarily love Alan Cumming, but...

I've listened to other books narrated by Alan Cumming and loved them, but this one not so much. His British accents in Babycakes are (as you would expect) excellent, but he manages to make every single female character in this book sound extraordinarily shrill. It marred the experience for me.

Fun Book in the Series Destroyed by Poor Narration

Would you listen to Babycakes again? Why?

No, because I can't take Alan Cumming's narration. He's ruining the book and doesn't seem to understand the first thing about acting or character. All of his female characters, regardless of their age, sound like an overly effete, drunk, air-headed, lush of a 13 year old girl. This one's definitely better in book form.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

See above.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, but Alan Cumming made it a chore. His amateurish narration was jarring and pulled me out of the book (which I have happily read at least eight times, like the rest of the series, since it was released).

Any additional comments?

Most of these books are better read than listened to, but this one is the most poorly narrated of all. It's impossible to love the characters the way you do in the book when they all talk like completely gushy drunken idiots.