A funny and thoroughly satisfying farce involving cinema and an escaped monkey.
A frustrated filmmaker tries to help his actor father save a monkey in this comic novel.
New Jersey, 1999. Would-be auteur Kevin Stacey is directing what he hopes will be his breakout independent feature, but things are going poorly. His crew is cranky; his actors are difficult; his budget is gone; and he’s starting to think he should have gone to law school. Things only get worse when his semiestranged father, Edward Stacey (stage name: Brian Edwards), shows up in a raincoat with a thick roll of cash, a handgun, and a capuchin monkey named Henry. Edward is a perennial extra with over 600 Hollywood films on his resume. “Name a film and my father was probably in it,” Kevin explains, “though only for a second, his face and body somewhere in the background, in the crowd, in the forgotten patches of the screen where the audience never looks.” It turns out Henry was recently freed from a research lab and the FBI is anxious to find him—and whomever liberated him. His heart softened by tales of animal cruelty, Kevin agrees to help his father find a safe home for Henry, though the task will encompass a cross-country road trip and suck in the director’s best friend and occasional lover, Veronica Merrin; his lawyer brother, Mike; and a movie-loving priest named Father Blank. Augello’s prose is sharp and funny, and he has a knack for imbuing ridiculous situations involving Kevin with psychological veracity: “My father sings in the shower, that strange song ‘MacArthur Park’ with its oddball lyrics about cake left in the rain. It’s a long song—he’s been in the shower for nearly ten minutes—yet Henry is enthralled. He sits outside the cracked bathroom door listening to my father croon.” The novel leaps around in time and point of view, which will help keep readers on their toes despite the fairly predictable plot. The story is a love letter to the movies—a very ’90s one at that—as well as a ’90s commentary on the treatment of lab animals. But at its best, the book is a sweet rumination on the relationships between difficult fathers and their sons.
A funny and thoroughly satisfying farce involving cinema and an escaped monkey.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68433-826-9
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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