An entertaining, unsettling exploration of the making of meaninglessness.
An unnamed photography student stalks the grounds of his elite art school in search of the truth about a mysterious fellow student.
The narrator of Rugeley’s punchy debut is entering his senior year at Take Creek, a private art school in upstate New York. Something of a photography prodigy, he earned admittance with a portfolio he shot in a San Francisco homeless camp in which he developed his “ragged and seedy aesthetic.” Since then, however, in spite of the tutelage of his world-famous mentor, Salter, the narrator has lost his way. He’s hard at work in his senior year, “struggling with a new series on process and color…shooting pictures of very small objects and then repurposing them in other completely irrelevant frames,” when Salter gives him an assignment: Surveil Take Creek’s new hotshot transfer student, Manning, who Salter believes is there to destroy his career. What follows is a wry, absurdist, at times achingly earnest romp through the darker crannies of metamodernist philosophy as it plays out on Take Creek’s campus. As the students and teachers become more deeply embroiled in the paranoia, isolation, and ennui that seems to imbue both the snow-smothered landscape and their art, the reader is periodically encouraged to consider the concurrent suffering that afflicts the world outside the school’s rarefied halls with paragraphs that report dystopian-skewed (fictional) current events juxtaposed against the mechanics of art-making at Take Creek. This technique reveals a narrator who is aware of the discrepancy between what is at stake in his art and what is at stake in reality, but unclear, as of yet, how to apply himself to bridging that gap. The result is a book full of loopy energy told with a terse, self-conscious sincerity reminiscent of a young man in a Salinger story who can find neither himself, nor anyone else, through the miasma of his own ideas.
An entertaining, unsettling exploration of the making of meaninglessness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798987747100
Page Count: 192
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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