A major accomplishment.
Several New Yorkers struggle to put down their phones in this debut comic novel.
There’s an abundance of characters in Bays’ novel, and almost none of them know what they want. There’s Alice, a 28-year-old nanny who thinks she wants to go to medical school but takes forever to register for the MCAT. There’s her new roommate, Roxy, a 34-year-old Manic Pixie flibbertigibbet with a City Hall job whose desires are even more amorphous: “Roxy wanted what she wanted to want, nothing more, nothing less.” Alice’s brother, Bill, is at loose ends after leaving MeWantThat, the shopping app he founded; he takes a sudden interest in Buddhism, which is met with skepticism by his wife, Pitterpat, who “made an activity of wanting” but also seems to realize that the tony real estate she covets won’t fill the emptiness inside her. The lives of the four characters (and several more, who move in and out of the novel) are all thrown into disarray when Roxy becomes embroiled in a scandal that transfixes the internet, Pitterpat gets diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and Bill impulsively makes a sudden, drastic life change. Throughout the novel, the characters wrestle with their addictions to their smartphones and social media: “Something’s happened to my brain,” Alice laments. “I don’t know what it is. But I think it has to do with this phone I can’t stop looking at every thirty fucking seconds.” Bays was a co-creator of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, so it’s no surprise his novel is highly comic—sometimes darkly so. (The characters watch a reality show called Love on the Ugly Side, one episode of which forces the contestants to watch “deepfake videos of their parents having sex in order to win a couple’s massage.”) What is surprising is how beautifully written it is and how deftly the author balances humor and heartbreak. Bays writes with real compassion that never turns sentimental, and the structure of the book, told from the point of view of a mysterious omniscient narrator, is ingenious. This is a rare thing: an original, intelligent novel that’s not just a perfect summer beach read, but one that deserves serious awards consideration as well. Put down your phone and pick it up.
A major accomplishment.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18676-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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