A collection that asks the question, “Can a story ever be too brief?” The answer is yes.
A book of microfictions featuring an even more experimental foray into the narrative structures of chance.
This collection, slender on the shelf at 140 pages, contains the hidden heft of no fewer than 47 individual flash fictions. Rarely more than two pages long, the stories are pithy, whimsical, ironic, and poignant by turn. Often, they use the extreme efficiency of their language to poke fun at some absurd exigency of modern society, as in “Ella’s Letter to the Editor of the Universe,” which whipsaws between peevish acerbity (“Someone has put Beauty in the same aisle as Health Essentials”) and existential complaint (“Someone has used the human penchant for choice to justify hatred”) in almost the same breath. Other stories use their brevity to eschew narrative linkage, as in “How Phil Imagines the Afterlife,” which uses an enigmatic list of non-sequiturs (“17. Did you make the reservation? 18. I guess it’s okay that the lifeguard’s a teenager”) to portray the afterlife as a series of overheard remarks at a crowded resort pool. The whimsy in these stories creates a pleasant, chatty overlay of language that sometimes parts to reveal a startling moment of insight as the largely earnest characters struggle through the narration’s insouciant wit. This conflict—character vs. language—is a fascinating one to follow through its various paces, but Parker’s other project here is less successful. Interspersed between the stories are 26 bingo cards with titles like “Change Your Life Bingo,” “Feti’s Border Crossing Bingo,” and “Don’t Hate Your Daddy Bingo.” These pieces push the experiment of narrative brevity to an extreme, inviting the reader to interact with a single word or brief phrase contained within the standard 25-square grid of a bingo card whose context is provided only by the card’s title. This freewheeling play with story structure—the reader can arrange the story along horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines as they see fit—is intellectually stimulating the first time it appears, but the pleasure of the form doesn’t hold up to repeat engagement.
A collection that asks the question, “Can a story ever be too brief?” The answer is yes.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781938603211
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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