Can a book that's languidly paced and discursive also be a joy? Yes.
A novel about the power of music for a misfit teen in 1980s small-town Minnesota—like a more rueful, meditative High Fidelity.
It's 1999, and Matt Carnap is back in his dying hometown, living in the apartment his uncle has created for him in the press box of a disused municipal football stadium. Matt is spinning his wheels, wandering downtown to catalog its ruins and reminiscing about what he now considers his golden age—the tween years, when his mom (now dead) was married to Russ, a charming, unambitious record collector who spent his time and passion DJing in the roller rink he owned. Matt's mother was distant, even neglectful, and the marriage was never hardy, but she couldn't fail to see the value in the alliance her awkward boy, suffering from attention-deficit issues and a lifelong, horrendous case of insomnia, forged with his stepfather around rock and funk and skating. Eventually she took up with another man, a nightmarish theater and music teacher/blowhard in a nearby town, and Matt had to move with her into what seemed wretched exile. The rink closed, and Russ took up the itinerant life of the DJ who insists on naming his own tunes. In the years since, Matt's lost track of Russ, and part of the impetus for moving back is the hope of reconnection. This novel has several features that sound fatal: It's relentlessly inward (the insular Matt rarely engages with anyone), backward-looking (about 90% flashback), with minimal plot; the tone is nostalgic, even in the end a little hokey; long sections consist largely of playlists of cool music of the 1970s and '80s. And yet it's a pleasure: smart, with lots of sentence-level snap, and with much to say about the way that music—really any of life's animating pleasures and passions, but especially music, for a lonely child of late-20th-century America—becomes not merely a backdrop or soundtrack, but the thread along which one strings a life.
Can a book that's languidly paced and discursive also be a joy? Yes.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-56689-639-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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 tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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