A knotty, philosophical mystery dense with lingering regrets.
In Harnett’s debut novel, a middle-aged man reflects on his adolescence while searching for his missing first love and the contentedness that has eluded him.
In the year 2033, the 52-year-old narrator’s old flame, June, contacts him and asks him to look after her cat. She then disappears—precisely as climate protests in the United States give way to a dissolution of government. As the nation is reborn in small pockets of local administration, the narrator returns to his hometown, Harmony Valley, in search not only of June, but of the simplicity of childhood. The unnamed narrator was 12 years old and June 15 when they first met at school. She pulled him into a half-real fantasy, shadowing the school janitor and uncovering the meeting room of a secret society—the L.E.F (“The Order of Friends of Liberty”). While the narrator lost interest and drifted into an unsatisfying life, June took the L.E.F. seriously. Around that time, Vietnamese lawyer Tiffany Ho joined the law firm of Jeremiah & Jeremiah, a generational enterprise that has long acted for one important client. How are June, Tiffany, and the L.E.F. connected? Sifting through his memories, can the narrator finally make sense of the past and seize hold of the happiness he let slip through his fingers? Harnett writes in the first person, crafting a wistful work that reflects both the uncertain child and the nostalgic adult. The prose grows wild and heavy with description, the narrator feeling his way and making no attempt to cut extraneous recollections or orientate the reader regarding the political upheaval. The tale is thus heavily immersive—and all the better for it (though readers who prefer clarity will appreciate the appended timeline of events). As is so often the way with memoir, the young narrator emerges more clearly than his older self. June is a force of nature, as enigmatic in later life as she was in school. Other characters come and go via well-drawn vignettes. The story must slowly be pieced together, like a jigsaw puzzle, and the sorting is perhaps more satisfying than the final picture. Nonetheless, there is plenty here to reward the reader’s commitment. Numerous full-page black-and-white illustrations accompany the text and recall the excitability of middle-grade stories.
A knotty, philosophical mystery dense with lingering regrets.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9867445-4-4
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Serpent Key Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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