A rich portrait of a man and a town hanging by a thread, beautifully written and deeply felt.
A banker looking for second chances navigates the treacherous social currents of a small town in Montana in Petersen’s soulful novel.
Returning to his boyhood home of Harlowton, Montana, after alcoholism, womanizing, and an occasionally violent temper demolished his career and marriage in Bozeman, Chet Norem takes a job as president of the Harlo International National Bank and starts rebuilding his life. That’s not easy, given the numerous oddballs and schemers among the townsfolk. First among them is his boyhood pal Charlie Shinola, a loose-cannon cowboy whom Chet is always rescuing from scrapes, including a two-day bender that concluded with Charlie driving Chet’s truck into a deer (which left Charlie with a ticket from the game warden and a major repair bill). Further complicating Chet’s life are the bank’s majority stockholder, who constantly questions Chet’s decisions, and Chet’s lawyer, who secretly spreads malicious rumors about the deer crash to besmirch his client’s reputation. Chet’s also fighting a cold war with his cruel ex-wife, Jess (“You look...smaller than I remember,” she jibes), and trying to repair his relationship with his estranged son, Noel, a gay theater major and drug addict who believes that Chet is not his father—and is under the spell of a sinister artist. On the plus side is Lacey Dey-Lux, the multifaceted daughter of a wealthy rancher—she’s a southern belle, assertive businesswoman, and painter—who borrows money from the bank to build a riding arena; she and Chet begin a torrid affair, with Chet only somewhat perturbed by the fact that she’s married. Chet continues trying to shore up his family, friends, and business, but his moral compromises increasingly destabilize his situation and put his reputation as a steady financial pillar at risk, until tensions come to a head in a shocking eruption of bloodshed.
Petersen’s yarn feels like a sagebrush-flavored John Updike novel. It evokes the vast landscape of Montana cattle country, where even a banker must contend with winds and hailstorms, glittering but treacherous trout streams, and corrals knee-deep in manure. The labyrinthine narrative loops back and forth across generations of Harlo’s secret loves, vendettas, and hidden parentages, knotting the characters into intricate skeins of resentment and obligation. Chet is a tarnished but decent hero, a careful numbers guy with a yen for art and poetry stuck in mid-life, still grasping at sex and happiness but rueful and ruminative about his failings. (“He hadn’t hugged his daughter in several weeks, and he hadn’t spoken to his son in months. At some point, it dawns on a man that he just may never love again.”) Petersen’s prose luxuriates in pungent, pitch-perfect dialogue that banters obliquely around his characters’ conflicts—until it comes harshly to the point. (Confronted in flagrante by a jealous, knife-wielding boyfriend, Chet hears “the morning-after hacksaw voice of his lovebird waitress, the perfect tone and texture to convey her considerable wrath: ‘Lousy fucking chickenshit showing up here like this now…You stand back or I’ll blow you in half before you so much as nick a hair offa his ever-lovin’ ass.’”) The result is a superb modern Western, full of evocative detail and hard-bitten wisdom.
A rich portrait of a man and a town hanging by a thread, beautifully written and deeply felt.Pub Date: June 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781941052761
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Pronghorn Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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