A coming-of-age novel focused on its endearing narrator’s introspection rather than typical teenage drama.
Set in Boston, Roamer’s third installment in a series stars a gentle, queer teenager who’s full of questions.
Picking up after the first two books, Why Can’t Life Be Like Pizza (2020) and Why Can’t Freshman Summer Be Like Pizza (2020), Roamer continues to follow his 15-year-old narrator, RV, into his sophomore year at the prestigious Boston Latin School. Everything in RV’s life seems uneasy at the moment. He’s no longer in the class of his mentor, Mr. Aniso. His best friend Carole is too wrapped up in her crush on a French boy to pay him much attention. His parents’ fights are only getting worse. And, most troubling of all, his friendship with Bobby—the handsome African American jock with whom he shared his first same-sex kiss—has not been the same since Bobby joined varsity football. To cope, RV drowns his teenage sorrows in cheese slices at Joe’s Pizza, his local haunt. He also strikes up a new friendship with Mark, a born-again Christian who first seems only interested in ogling their exotic Spanish teacher, Señorita Sánchez, but slowly reveals surprising depth. RV continues to grapple with his sexuality as LGBTQ+ issues come up around him at home, at school, and in the news, but his exact feelings on whether he’s really gay and how that fits with his Catholic upbringing remain elusive. Roamer’s characters tend to speak a little too earnestly for believable modern-day teenagers. (“Knowing you’re cheering for me will give me even more motivation,” Bobby says stiffly, without any sense of irony or flirtation at one point.) However, RV’s inner monologue feels fluid and endearingly neurotic, and Roamer excels at narrating the book’s most emotional moments. An intriguing potential love triangle seems inevitable, but this story is all about youthful apprehension and hesitation. Some readers might be frustrated with RV’s (and thus the book’s) slow progress, but by focusing on subtler plot points, RV comes to terms with issues of sex, religion, and race at his own pace.
A coming-of-age novel focused on its endearing narrator’s introspection rather than typical teenage drama.Pub Date: April 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64890-171-3
Page Count: 283
Publisher: NineStar Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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