A unique, scrappy, tender bildungsroman.
A vivid portrait of a young girl growing up on a Caribbean island in the 1960s.
Wheeler’s mother has departed for England in search of a better life. Left in the care of their two aunts, Innez and Celeste, young Wheeler and her older sisters Adele and Hesta have stayed behind on the unnamed island. Also in the house are Innez’s sons: Donelle—Wheeler’s age, and her playmate—Jonathan, and Floyd, the eldest, whose wicked temper and mean spirit terrorize the whole family. Wheeler desperately misses her mother and waits impatiently for her to send for the three of them to join her. Often alone, she feels uncared for by her bossy older sisters and her fierce, mysterious aunts: “She in hav no farda, she in hav no mudda. She in hav nobody…dey mudda in sending f’dem.” Even Donelle disappoints her—his loyalty is fickle. Wheeler struggles to understand the world, her island, and her family without her mother: “Having not troubled her before, time these days seemed all the while to be shoving Wheeler around.” She strives to uncover the secrets behind her family’s dysfunction, attempting to grasp the “darkness [she and Donelle] sensed in big people’s lives.” Hawk’s novel grapples with the simultaneous, oft-overlooked wonder and terror of being a young person experiencing things for the first time. Wheeler confronts the full gamut of emotions with a charming stubbornness. Hawk’s prose is beautiful, a lyrical and loving portrayal of an island and its people; much of the dialogue is written in dialect, which can be both challenging and rewarding.
A unique, scrappy, tender bildungsroman.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771966535
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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