A Fourth of July weekend on Cape Cod takes a dark turn in a solid debut with a well-conceived plot.
In McMahon’s first novel, shocking events test the loyalties and moral convictions of neighbors at a popular vacation spot.
The Murray and Clarke families own adjacent beachfront properties on Seaview Road on Cape Cod and have summered there for decades. The two Murray children, 19-year-old Katie and 22-year-old Ryan, grew up playing on the beach with the three Clarke children, Amelia, J.J., and Eric. Eric, however, has become estranged from the rest of his successful, Instagram-perfect clan. Katie and Ryan work long hours at the exclusive Monomo Dunes Country Club, where the staff is an amalgam of affluent residents of Monomo, like themselves, and people from neighboring Worona, a blue-collar town that “sniffed the water but didn’t cradle it like its neighbor did.” The club employees socialize after hours, though the Monomo parents frown on too much interaction with townies from Worona, where drugs, particularly opiates, are a problem. After a family-friendly day of Fourth of July parades and games, hordes of young adults descend on nearby Greenstone Lake for some serious partying. The Murray parents are skeptical of the evening activities but trust their kids’ good judgment. After Katie witnesses a crime, she has to make agonizing and dangerous choices. From the onset, a malevolent aura hovers over the action in the form of intermittent musings by an anonymous narrator who has committed heinous acts and attempts to justify them. These interludes are often more effective in driving the plot and generating tension than the frequent anecdotes about incidental characters and attempts at social commentary. Some unnecessary thesaurus-happy diversions detract from the compelling action: A character’s fists are “aware of their thew,” and golfers play on a “tenebrous beach.” But the author often hits the right notes, such as when he describes a local kid’s accent as what “Alec Baldwin was shooting for in The Departed” or suggests the complex social dynamics of a friendly golf game. This suspenseful novel ultimately exposes the blighted underside of a divided locale.
A Fourth of July weekend on Cape Cod takes a dark turn in a solid debut with a well-conceived plot.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-62576-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Some Other Time Books
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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