A work by a talented author that doesn’t quite live up to its promise.
An aging writer is visited by the ghosts of women who inspired his books in Hagood’s literary novel.
James Roth III—who’s known as “Herzog” to his friends, for unexplained reasons—is a teacher, a Vietnam veteran, and the author of two “great American novels…about Jackie Kennedy and Valerie Solanas respectively, which have gotten me laid since the 1980s and won me just about every literary award possible,” he says. Recently, however, he’s been plagued by writer’s block. One night, while spying on his nude female neighbor with a telescope, he’s visited by the ghost of one of his muses: Jacqueline Kennedyherself. Later, Valerie Solanas’ spirit visits him, as well. The former is resentful, and the latter plain angry at Herzog and about various aspects of American culture. But will these two women help him to understand the tragedies in his own life, which have turned him into a different sort of ghost? This is a slim novel, divided into chapters that are rarely much longer than a page in length. Hagood ably plays ventriloquist to Jackie and Valerie, narrating each of the characters, in turn, with elegant, elegiac monologues. Here, for instance, Jackie describes her life after the assassination of her husband: “I continued to repeat violent history to everyone who would listen in the exact same words, in a flat tone of voice, as if in a fugue. It was not something I could stop. It was as though I had been overtaken. I needed an exorcist.” But although all three major characters are impressively rendered, they offer readers few surprises. Herzog feels like a mere caricature of a 20th-century American male novelist, and Jackie won’t upend readers’ expectations about the real-life historical figure. The somewhat more obscure Valerie is more intriguing, but she’s given the least space of the three. The abbreviated A Christmas Carol structure suggests that there will be some sort of reckoning, and there is—it has to do with the writer’s view of women—but there isn’t enough of a solid narrative surrounding it to make it feel real and earned.
A work by a talented author that doesn’t quite live up to its promise.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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