Worth the 35-year wait for Yoshimoto’s Anglophone fans.
A young woman’s relationship with her eccentric aunt leads her to startling revelations about her life and her past.
Nineteen-year-old Yayoi is haunted by an inability to remember her past. She has an uncanny sense of the future, however: She can often sense who will be on the phone when it begins ringing. After an odd vision in her family’s bathroom, she becomes unsettled enough to leave home, landing on the doorstep of her young aunt, Yukino. Yukino is only about 11 years Yayoi’s senior, but she has already settled into a “spinster” persona, living alone in a large, cluttered house and teaching music at a local high school. When Yayoi begins to press Yukino for answers to questions she has about her blurry past, the pieces of Yayoi’s past—and future—begin to fall into place. This short novel was first published in Japan in 1988, but its floaty interiority feels timeless. (Even Yukino’s obsession with the Friday the 13th films still feels plausible.) In some ways, this is an archetypal coming-of-age story about being young and needing to leave home in order to gain clarity, but both the style and the plot particulars (including a slightly off-kilter love story subplot) set it apart. Translator Yoneda elegantly renders Yoshimoto’s synesthetic descriptions and atmospheric settings, which range from Tokyo to numerous rural locales. Yoshimoto has become a happier writer—or at least more interested in writing happy characters—as her career has unfolded. But this melancholy bildungsroman acknowledges the way that leaving behind adolescence can evoke the bittersweet sensation of waking up from a strange and vivid dream. “Only by coming through it,” Yayoi thinks of her visit to Yukino, “could I get to living the rest of my life.”
Worth the 35-year wait for Yoshimoto’s Anglophone fans.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781640093713
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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