A gritty, heartfelt journey through the recent past.
In Stockwell’s three connected novellas, a man stumbles through addiction, recovery, and the countercultural scene of 1990s Washington.
The epigraphs of the first two novellas collected here come from Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski; like these writers, Stockwell is concerned with those down on their luck. In these stories, he traces the wobbly arc of Jack, a “microcosm of Generation X” who is “addicted to everything.” When he is first introduced, Jack is 28 years old and living in a psychiatric institution after losing his mother, his primary support system. The first novella, Sleeping in the Daytime, largely traces the period following his release from the institution, including his time in a halfway house rooming with a schizophrenic Vietnam War veteran who never showers and working up the courage to ask out the barista at the local coffee shop he frequents. The narrative includes regular flashbacks to Jack’s past, including his physically abusive relationship with his older brother (“Besides the sporadic 911 calls, occasional attempted knifings, and regular baseball bat duels, things had actually been pretty good between Laurence and Jack back then”) and his attempts to “liberat[e] his mind from Mormon indoctrination.” The second novella, Courting Mediocrity, fills in more of Jack’s backstory, focusing mainly on his first institutionalization at age 18 and how he met most of his crew of friends/fellow drug dealers and abusers. It also charts Jack’s brief stint in Utah, where he turns 30 and finds employment at a Taco Bell. (Jack finds some relief in this stability, but it does not last long.) There is more redemption in the final novella, Squattingin the Shadow of an Ant, which tracks Jack’s path down to Seattle and the most stable of his major relationships. Throughout, Stockwell balances the hard-edged, Gen X tone with more wistful reflections on a time lost. This comes through most strongly in the final few chapters, as Seattle morphs into its present form. Though occasionally repetitive, there is enough life and truth in the prose to keep the reader afloat, even as Jack repeatedly falls into the same destructive patterns.
A gritty, heartfelt journey through the recent past.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781963805895
Page Count: 340
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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