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
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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