Equal parts ambitious and intimate, with enough humanity and empathy to keep weighty themes from swallowing it whole.
When the Earth starts spinning just a bit faster, three people from a small Alaska town find their lives intertwined with each other's and the fate of the planet.
Foster's debut novel has grand ambitions, which are made intimate through a close examination of the characters at its core. Twenty-year-old Tanner wants to escape Keber Creek, a town of 900 people, and especially his father, so he reaches out to a fellow Keber Creek native, Victor Bickle, a former Columbia professor of mechanical engineering, for advice. Tanner quickly finds himself working as Bickle’s assistant at the Circumglobal Westward Circuit Group, where Bickle has parlayed his internet success into a job as host of the company’s new series, Professor Bickle’s Science Hour, where he bounces between acting as a spokesperson and scientist. The days are growing shorter, though, and opponents of CWC suggest that its pioneering travel program, which can jet people across the world in less than an hour, is the root cause. The clear connection between hyperspeed travel and rapidly shortening days is clear to activists across the globe, and it’s a cause taken up by 15-year-old Winnie, another Keber Creek resident, as a way to make friends during a lonely high school experience. She and her friends protest this pursuit of profit over global stability, and her world slowly begins to find its way to Tanner and Bickle’s, with Foster artfully weaving their stories together. Winnie spends much of the book desperately pondering her existence in relation to her mother, who haunts the novel like a ghost after trying to take her own life, unlikely to emerge from her coma. She was looking, explains Foster, “to deny that she was in this world deeply and truly without a reason.” While a definitive reason never arrives, Winnie might take heed of one of Tanner’s observations during the novel’s waning pages: “In Greek, ‘apocalypse’ means an uncovering or unveiling; it means something brought into view.”
Equal parts ambitious and intimate, with enough humanity and empathy to keep weighty themes from swallowing it whole.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164483
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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