A novel of almost depthless darkness and a show of significant talent.
Five teenage boys come of age together, mostly experiencing the worst life has to offer.
In a small city called Carbon, Hal, Carter, Cody John, Zachary, and Dylan are on the high school wrestling team. Most of the time they spend together outside of wrestling involves driving around in Dylan’s decrepit car and consuming drugs and alcohol. Hal, the narrator, is prone to dark thoughts and fixations on the litany of tragedies that have occurred in their town. He understands that he’s different from others, including his friends: “I had gone wrong somewhere. There was no fixing that.” Hal’s loathing is largely reserved for himself but not always; he got into wrestling after an incident in eighth grade when he beat another student so badly that the kid “looked majorly deformed.” Amid their roughhousing and drinking and this bleakness, the boys show affection in their own ways, and Cody John and Hal are especially tender to one another. In a moment of watching his friend, Hal thinks, “If I had only had eyes for one thing then it would have been Cody John, stood on the borderline, cradled in stars with his body whole.” On one particularly charged night, the boys drive out to a place “tucked under the summit of the mountain,” where something occurs that will destroy their lives. Mallon employs an unquestionably unique writing style in this debut novel; Hal narrates in plenty of short, blunt sentences (“Everything he did he hit it too hard. I understood that. I knew all about that”), but some of the language, while interesting, is embellished slightly past its peak (“Styrofoam beads torn away by the warm wind to pack out the cracks in the concrete”). This is an intense, bleak tale that gets even darker after its turning point. Readers (especially sensitive ones) should approach this powerful novel with care, exploring as it does the troubled bonds we hold dear and the traumatic events that people, even and especially younger people, can endure.
A novel of almost depthless darkness and a show of significant talent.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781668084427
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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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