A madcap, raunchy, unconventional text about medical abuses and literary art, infused with both humor and rage.
A struggling writer in Philadelphia tries to regain her creative footing after a botched surgery.
Sent to an eye clinic while dealing with her autoimmune disease, writer Cumin Baleen is told to get immediate surgery or risk going suddenly blind. But the procedure she undergoes “singe[s]” her brain, and she loses the ability to write anything but short, plain sentences. At the high-end grocery store where she works, called Sea & Poison, Cumin reads Shusaku Endo’s novel of the same name and meditates on human vivisection, “this need to experiment on the human, to puncture the human lung and see what happens.” After her "Unitarian Waldorfian" boyfriend announces he’s in love with their landlady, a professor of Oulipian literature, Cumin rents a closet in the bedroom of a polyamorous “theatre professional.” Dark, digressive, manic, and self-referential, the novel eschews traditional narrative structures: “I am organizing a novel now best I can, amidst the rivers and the piles of everyone, and walking only a broken, only an overgrown and burnt road in my mind.” When Cumin gets trapped at a reading, the first-person narrative switches to the story being read out loud. While some readers may lose patience, those who persevere will find seemingly unconnected strands converging around a conspiracy that involves human experimentation, writing constraints, capitalism, and our beleaguered protagonist. Beilin can be very funny, as when Cumin mistakes a Glade PlugIn (shell design) for a madeleine-shaped butt plug. But the real subject here is human suffering—and in particular the medical mistreatment of women—and the question at the heart of the book is: How do we bear witness to abuse?
A madcap, raunchy, unconventional text about medical abuses and literary art, infused with both humor and rage.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780811239516
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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