A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.
Hewn out of the brutality of Watership Down and the trenchant ironies of Animal Farm, this is an animal story for adults.
A fable that makes Aesop’s darkest seem saccharine, Italian author Zannoni’s debut novel concerns Archy, a beech marten (a weasel-like animal) inhabiting a stretch of forest with his small family. With a dead father, a harsh, unfeeling mother, and siblings barely able to make their way through the brush, young Archy can only envision a Hobbesian future for himself: nasty, brutish, and short. When his mother sells him as a slave to the mysterious Solomon, a fox who has set himself up as the woodland’s only trader-lender (with the help of his bodyguard/enforcer, a dog called Joel), Archy finds himself receiving many beatings for his clumsy mistakes as well as an odd, intriguing education at Solomon’s hands. Gradually, the marten meets other denizens of the forest and discovers life to be nothing less than drenched in the red of tooth and claw. Growing into a stumbling adulthood, Archy wills himself to learn at Solomon’s feet, to open himself up to the fox’s abusive instruction, which stems from a strange human book, the Bible, which the old trader found years earlier while feeding on the body of a hanged man. In time, Archy yearns to live on a higher, less degraded plane and turns to his painfully acquired writing talents to make sense of the carnage around him. The character of Archy, in all his awkward, vulnerable marten-ness, emerges as courageously as any classical hero. Finding happiness in the arms of a beloved only to have her ripped away, finding stability in the trading post after the death of his master only to be driven from it by interlopers, he is a noble, tormented protagonist striving amid a beastly contingent of the selfish, stupid, and evil. This darkly beguiling novel casts its enchantments with an eye trained on the human heart, with its false chambers and rough, bestial inclinations.
A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377285
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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