An entertaining beach read, a bit wacky but with plenty of heart.
In Castoro’s madcap novel, a single mother leaves the city for the suburbs and finds herself the target of the community’s chief bully and blackmailer.
Eddie Hest loves living in Detroit and doesn’t want to move, but her landlord has sold the building where she resides. Divorced from her young daughter’s drug-addicted father, Eddie has only 30 days to find a new place for herself and Grace. Eddie has always been a bit of a nonconformist (think purple hair and a variety of tattoos) with a strong streak of independence, but she’s fiercely committed to being a “good mom” to Grace, and that requires setting up a stable home. After borrowing the down payment from her mother, she purchases a small house in Shady Hollow, a Detroit suburb. Once Grace enrolls in fourth grade in her new school and joins the soccer team, Eddie learns how strange her new hometown is. When she picks Grace up from practice, Eddie sees that no adults are there to supervise the children. She emails the coach to ask why the children were left alone. Days later, Eddie is accosted, berated, and threatened by a “Psycho Soccer Mom” who turns out to be the coach’s wife; Eddie is now in the crosshairs of the tyrant of Shady Hollow. (“Never! Ever! Question what he does. Or you’ll have to answer to me!”) Castoro’s imaginatively constructed novel is narrated by Eddie, who records psychiatric “sessions” in an empty room in which she listens only to her own voice; through these recordings, readers follow her string of suburban misadventures as she’s pulled into the bizarre machinations of Psycho Soccer Mom. The narrative is bolstered by an eclectic assembly of secondary characters, and Eddie is an energetic, edgy protagonist. Breezy, conversational, and often biting prose propels the action in an unconventional storyline that manages to be simultaneously absurd and tender, all the while offering a lesson in the power of self-affirmation.
An entertaining beach read, a bit wacky but with plenty of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798986714257
Page Count: -
Publisher: WunderWay Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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