It’s not always clear where this novel is going, but readers will enjoy getting there.
O’Banion’s debut novel follows the adventures of a curmudgeon on a quest to recover his cat.
Life has taken a wrong turn for Alton Tapscott, a retired literature professor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana: his son, Archie, tricked him into moving to St. Ignatius Condo Community; his high-tech hearing implant, LIZA, is malfunctioning again; and now his only trusted friend, a cat named Mack, has gone missing, evicted from the premises by the cunning resident council president, Cooper Murray. This humorous, lightly plotted novel introduces readers to the world of semi-independent living, complete with robotic canine companions, soup nights, and mandatory bingo sessions. In his Kafkaesque struggle against increasingly despotic disciplinary hearings, Tapscott forms alliances with the quirky cast of St. Ignatius residents, including eccentric liberal Camille Renatta, fellow widower Noel Cone, and sinister nun Mary Clotilde, as obsessed with her rose bushes as she is with giving Alton impromptu therapy sessions. Much like Alton, who ends up in a wheelchair he can hardly navigate, the novel struggles to follow any chain of events to a logical conclusion. It is also, for no apparent reason, set in the distant future—a fact that the author never uses to its full potential except to crack an occasional joke: “Residents awoke to the whirring of delivery drones and the slap of competing local newspapers.” St. Ignatius is meant to represent the extreme political opposites of American society (introducing Tapscott to fellow resident Poppy Burt, Murray remarks, “She’s…a terrible racist…but she’ll be dead before the next election”), but the idea gets lost among Tapscott’s lengthy soliloquies on everything from the indignity of growing old to the misfortune of his name. These, fortunately, are often hilarious: “My name is registered with the State of Louisiana as Alton B. Tapscott, but the IRS knows me by Alton Tapscott, Alton Tap Scott, and the always charming, Scott Tap.”
It’s not always clear where this novel is going, but readers will enjoy getting there.Pub Date: March 23, 2023
ISBN: 978-1946182296
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Texas Book Publishers Association
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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