A lighthearted but outdated tale about keeping the counterculture alive.
Two artistic friends get pulled into an odd series of socially disruptive acts in this literary novel.
Harry Gnostopolos co-owns the Cabrillo with his girlfriend, Dana, in San Francisco’s foggy Richmond District. The independent movie theater is struggling financially, which is putting a strain on the couple’s relationship. Added to this is Harry’s recently developed gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges—ironic given his proximity to so many large ones. Dana is convinced this is just a new manifestation of Harry’s unwillingness to leave his beloved San Francisco, something that Dana is anxious to do. She’s also confounded as to why Harry, who made an Oscar-nominated Kerouac biopic right out of film school, never tried to make a second movie. Then Jackson Halifax reenters Harry’s life. A notorious author and bohemian Harry knew in his younger days. Jackson brings with him a Beats-obsessed Moroccan woman named Nadine Chakir, with whom Harry becomes infatuated at first glance. It turns out that Jackson is in need of a cash influx just as much as Harry is, and he has just the plan for how to get it. Jackson has connections to a mysterious woman named Madam X, who pays him to complete strange, high-profile tasks, such as dismantling all of the Facebook-installed speed cameras around San Francisco. Can they pull off this modern Merry Pranksters job in order to become financially solvent? And if they do, what even more earth-shattering tricks could they manage? Along with Jackson, Nadine, and a cabal of mysterious criminals, Harry may have the chance to strike back in the name of the bohemian San Francisco of his youth.
Janjigian’s tale is a buoyant pastiche, full of unexpected brawls, journeys, romances, and impassioned dialogues about life and art. There is a nostalgia for an earlier, bohemian time shared by the author and most of his characters, all of whom love the Beats, San Francisco, and romantic, itinerant lifestyles. But this enthusiasm comes across more as fandom for a thing than the thing itself, and the book is filled with passages like this one—about a former acquaintance of Harry’s—that ring thoroughly hollow: “Arsen had left San Francisco to follow a beautiful bipolar Spaniard whom he’d fallen tragically in love with. When things fell apart, he stayed in Barcelona trying to figure out his next move, with suicide on the table of options.” Jackson is a complete contrivance—the leader of a surrealist art movement who became a successful fiction writer, vineyard owner, boxer, and, finally, art thief. Harry loves him, and readers are supposed to love him as well. (Most will not.) To confirm how completely rooted the novel is in the mid-20th century, the book ends up with a deep dive into the real story behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. (All the more befuddling, as Harry and Jackson are supposed to be members of Generation X.) If this is the old San Francisco that has been lost to gentrification, many readers might rather peruse a novel about the tech industry.
A lighthearted but outdated tale about keeping the counterculture alive.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2020
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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