A sensitive portrayal of sibling love, grief, and the trauma of dislocation.
A younger brother’s death by suicide in Madrid haunts the immigrant narrator of this second novel by award-winning Mexican writer Navarro.
An unnamed protagonist and her brother, Diego, live with their grandparents in Mexico City. When only a girl herself, she was charged with her brother’s care by their mother, who left in search of work and a better life in Spain. Though their mother promised to send for them soon, it’s nine years before they join her in Madrid. A teenager by this point, bullied in school, Diego takes refuge in the music of Vampire Weekend, while the narrator works a series of poorly paid caretaking and cleaning jobs. Navarro writes with authority and sympathy about the stress of being an immigrant, including loneliness, exhaustion, poor working conditions, and the strain of constantly feeling foreign and unwelcome. The novel starts with Diego’s death by suicide, and continues in a series of layered flashbacks. While Navarro is broadly interested in themes of immigration and the colonial legacy, the novel is firmly rooted in the specific, palpable lives of her characters, which she renders with nuance and honesty. When Diego turns moody and withdrawn, steals money, and skips class, his sister thinks: “I understood Diego. Ever since we got to Spain we’d been like amputees with no diagnosis. Like we were missing something, but everyone denied it....What could have possibly been amputated? Well, Mexico, I thought. They’ve cut off our Mexico.” But Mexico itself is violent and unsafe, as she sees firsthand after returning with her brother’s ashes. It provided a “sense of belonging, but at the same time of being a crab in a bucket climbing onto the backs of the others, trying to get out.”
A sensitive portrayal of sibling love, grief, and the trauma of dislocation.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781324096085
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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