A funny and charming Hollywood tale, but one that could have been tighter.
In Thompson’s novel, a 31-year-old man in Los Angeles with few career prospects begins coaching middle school lacrosse.
It’s 2014, and Ryan Wilson is a 31-year-old aspiring screenwriter who’s become disenchanted by the film industry and upset about his general lack of success: “I was supposed to have things…Tennis lessons and Aesop hand soap. New restaurants I just had to try. The finer things. Thread counts.” This leads him to accept a position as a lacrosse coach at the private Brentwood School. He’s immediately annoyed by the self-important athletic director, Keri,as well as his co-coach, Colby Cuthbert, who lacks appropriate experience and seems more concerned with performing his best approximation of a coach in between comedy gigs. Despite his initial misgivings about the job, Ryan quickly takes to his preteen charges, building a rapport and giving them unique nicknames. He establishes a similar bond with a few of the parents—most notably, Camilla Tourney. Ryan is instantly taken with her, particularly after he learns her husband is a major producer and director. As their friendship, which begins as flirtatious banter, transforms into a full-blown affair, Ryan is torn between his desire for Camilla and his desire to sell a script. Later, the lacrosse team, which has improved under Ryan’s tutelage, makes it to the championship. However, despite Ryan briefly having everything he wants within reach—team victory, romance, a genuine career opportunity—he can’t help but get in his own way. Indeed, as a protagonist, Ryan frequently seems at odds with himself; his internal monologue is full of hyper-specific references (“Venice, California is the Wilco of Los Angeles neighborhoods”), yet in dialogue, he’s mostly vague, though affably irreverent.
Thompson’s tale of one man’s downward spiral into adulthood is, by turns, charming and cringe-inducing—the latter mainly when readers see Ryan falling headlong into a bad decision. However, the novel can be slightly frustrating at times, as some of the more esoteric references during scene-setting could warrant further explanation: “a guy who looked like he produced Doug Liman movies…was probably working at Lakeshore or Bad Robot or HoneyBucket.” For the most part, though, the story’s cultural references are its greatest strengths, as when one character notes how he’d be okay if his wife cheated on him with the actor Matt Dillon: “He’s just threatening enough to be bummed out about but for some reason I could get over it.” However, the dense prose gives the story a meandering fell, and sometimes even undermines the jokes. For example, after a disastrous sexual experience, Ryan muses about Camilla, and his aside lessens the impact of his one-liner: “She finally got the nerve to adulterize—yes, yes: it’s not a noble practice but at the very least the impudent act takes some gall—and all she got was the second to last verse of ‘Desolation Row.’” Thompson is obviously talented, but his constant, fastidious quips sometimes detract from the heart of the piece.
A funny and charming Hollywood tale, but one that could have been tighter.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781957184944
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Onion River Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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