A heartfelt and deeply human collective portrait set in a palace of consumerism.
Stanton’s novel tracks the intersecting lives of customers and employees of a 1980s mall.
It’s 1983, and a brand-new indoor shopping center has just opened up on the edge of a large Ohio city. Built on the former site of a meadow filled with wildflowers, Dandelion Crossing is all things to all people: an eyesore and traffic magnet to local homeowners; a place of employment for lonely do-gooders, bookish transplants, and ex-convicts; a mark of progress for an ambitious local politician; and a glass-ceiling-shattering zenith in the career of the mall’s female executive. It’s a place where an artist, recently relocated from New York City and suffering from heartbreak, finds his groove coaching a team of high schoolers in a breakdancing competition; where a closeted gay teen decides to risk being recognized while seeing a movie about a male stripper; and where a widow in need of a new hairdresser finds herself in the chair of a spiky-haired goth whose receptionist seems unfamiliar with the concept of a perm. The mall brings together locals from across the metropolitan area who might otherwise never meet, allowing storylines to converge unexpectedly and long-simmering emotions to burst forth like water from the mall’s fountain. Stanton revels in the ’80s setting, enhancing the stories with funny period references. A gang of rowdy teenage girls calls themselves The Benatars, for instance, and a hapless pet store employee evaluates her own sexual orientation based on the era’s detective shows: “Truth be told, Amy wasn’t sure where she fell. Except for her persistent crush on TV’s mustachioed Matt Houston, whose devil-may-care independence she greatly admired, it was rare for her to feel sexual attraction to anyone.” (There’s even a phone-call cameo by art icon Keith Haring.) In Stanton’s capable hands, the sterile mall quickly transforms into an unlikely town square: a place where people not only search for goods and services, but for connection in all its forms.
A heartfelt and deeply human collective portrait set in a palace of consumerism.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798297577206
Page Count: 138
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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