A moody, spiky yarn of inherited loss and violence.
Sex, revenge, death, and hidden histories populate a rough landscape in this experimental debut.
The first novel by acclaimed young Mexican poet Mendoza opens with two soldiers, Lázaro and Juan, who’ve decided to desert. (No place and time are given, but the era of the Mexican Revolution is a reasonable surmise.) As they wander, they share stories or muse on their pasts, while encountering people with their own pasts to share; they discuss homosexuality, selling their souls to the Devil, and prostitution. Before he dies, Lázaro recalls his urge to locate his father, who abandoned him as a child and violently abused his mother; discovering he had the same father, Juan heads to the desert to track him down and kill him for “sowing the seed of his cursed bloodline everywhere he passed.” This spine of a plot, however lurid, matters less than the lyrical, phantasmagoric, symbolic tenor of the prose, through which Mendoza explores the fragile, fluid nature of the human body. Characters shift gender and even species, morphing from dog to human and back again; the dead speak; an extended sequence takes place in a morgue, with erotic overtones that couldn’t underscore the book’s themes of life and death more overtly. It’s bemusing, at times baffling stuff, but the bleak, eerie mood is well sustained. MacSweeney, an expert at translating tricky Spanish-language writers like Valeria Luiselli and Elvira Navarro, cleanly captures Mendoza’s urge to pile narrative upon narrative and maintains a poker-faced tone even when the storytelling is at its most transgressive. However confusing, the novel sustains the idea that cruelty is humanity’s inheritance; “so much pain had been stored in his well that it was now almost full,” Juan recalls, and he’s not the only one.
A moody, spiky yarn of inherited loss and violence.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781644213711
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Though uneven, this is still a pleasurable, comforting read.
Infertility, family secrets, and alpacas all figure in Quindlen’s latest meditation on mothering and domesticity.
Polly’s life looks enviable. Happily married to the adoring Mark—a vet at the Bronx Zoo—she teaches English at a private Manhattan girls’ school and loves her work. She has a protective older brother and close girlfriends, who’ve formed a book club where no one is expected to read the book. But Polly desperately wants a child and, at 42, knows time is running out. She and Mark have gone through endless fertility treatments, to no avail. Meantime, Polly’s friends have given her a DNA kit as a jokey birthday gift, and something mysterious shows up in the test results. Then, out of nowhere, a young woman contacts her, suggesting they may be related. That’s not all: Polly feels estranged from her mother, a revered judge who’s insufficiently maternal in her daughter’s view. Her father has always cherished her, but he’s in a nursing home now with a rapidly failing mind. And something is amiss with her best pal, Sarah. Quindlen’s trademark empathy is evident throughout, and her wry humor leavens some of the serious goings-on. Early on, Mark and Polly visit a fertility clinic with photos of babies in the waiting room; for Polly, “it felt…like a Weight Watchers facility with hot fudge sundae pictures on the wall.” Then we meet these charming alpacas, humming and pronking, on a farm run by an earth mother, whose wisdom will help Polly get on with her life. The plot swerves around a bit, there may be one surplus narrative thread (e.g., Polly’s star student Josephine running aground after graduation), and at the end, the author ties things up too neatly, pushing the “circle of life” theme too hard.
Though uneven, this is still a pleasurable, comforting read.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593734605
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
