A sometimes enjoyable, sometimes uneven homage to an oft-romanticized era.
A man fresh from the Navy must revitalize a leftist playhouse in this satirical counterculture novel.
San Francisco, 1968. The oddly named Student Patterson has just wrapped up his naval service aboard a refrigerator ship, but his post-discharge plans are not panning out. His fiancee, Debbie, sent him a Dear John letter—calling him a killer and also explaining their lack of sexual compatibility. Student then drowned his grief in a brothel in Saigon, and he now has a full complement of venereal diseases to deal with. He can at least enter his theater and folklore Ph.D. program as planned—though his advising professor has determined he is painfully underqualified. Student’s assigned to put on a play in the theater of the Butcher’s Town Writer’s Guild, which he discovers—just after he is pickpocketed—sits in a bad part of the city. During his initial meeting with the Thespian Committee, Student’s heart sinks further: “This collection of lame-brained, anachronistic Never-Weres and Has-Beens added up to the most catastrophic graduate program” in the long history “of colleges and universities. If needs be, he would hitchhike back to Iowa and raise chickens.” Due to his recent experiences with Debbie, Student has decided to adopt a “program of informed misogyny.” But his anti-women policy will be challenged by several students and colleagues, including the middle-aged socialist and set designer Millicent Rothstein, the grade-grubbing mother of two Jessica Bolton, and Debbie, who has not yet left his life for good—and who now has a baby in tow. Can Student repair his relationship with women, put on his play, earn his Ph.D., and successfully bridge the cultural gap between Vietnam veterans and hippie longhairs? It’s San Francisco in the late ’60s, so anything is possible.
Warner’s playful satire skewers many of the familiar types one finds in stories of ’60s America, often in unexpected ways. For instance, Student’s pickpocketing occurs when he’s stopped on his way to the theater by two older women who wish to give a hug to a patriotic serviceman—and promptly rob him blind. “One thing Mr. Student—south of Market—you worry less about flowers in your hair and more about creatures like those two misfits of femininity—they are a more effective criminal combo than if Mata-Hari and Carmen teamed up,” warns one of his new theater colleagues. The book has a number of postmodern flourishes, including a literal Greek chorus, the “Seers of Future Present,” that breaks in from time to time to warn Student about the trouble he’s about to get in for offending various powers. The story attempts to undermine Student’s posture of misogyny, but in doing so, it acts out quite a bit of it. There’s a lot of sexualizing going on—in part, perhaps, due to the free-love projects of many of the characters—but it sometimes leads to moments of extreme unpleasantness. (For instance, the Saigon sex workers Student patronizes are remarked to be no older than 15 years old.) The novel ends up walking a fine line between serving as a satire of a certain sort of libidinous male fantasy and becoming the thing itself.
A sometimes enjoyable, sometimes uneven homage to an oft-romanticized era.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60489-268-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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