A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.
In this debut novel, a young football coach puts the hopes of a West Virginia town on his shoulders.
Alderson, West Virginia, 1936. The Depression has brought its share of pain to the small, rural town, but the single greatest cause of suffering may be the fact that the local high school football team hasn’t won a game in two years. Last season, the team didn’t even score a single touchdown. Narrator Billy Shelton puts it this way: “I read an article once in a National Geographic magazine which said that every culture in the world has initiation rituals to define the moment when a boy becomes a man.…In West Virginia culture, the rite of passage which separated the men from the boys was football.” Fifteen-year-old Billy, a milk delivery boy with an ailing father, just wants a shot to prove himself on the gridiron. That shot may have just arrived in the form of the new football coach, 27-year-old Alexander Arbuckle McLaughlin. Coach, as everyone calls him, recently built a successful program elsewhere, and Billy and his teammates have hopes he can bring that magic to Alderson. But can one man really inspire a down-on-its-luck town to get back on its feet? Smith’s prose captures the language and texture of the setting. Here, Billy describes foraging for a local delicacy: “Picking Chinquapins is a tricky business, though. That’s why they aren’t grown commercially. First, you have to find them before the squirrels and birds get them. Second, the nuts are covered by a prickly bur. Getting a nut out of an unopen bur is difficult. You have to put it on the ground and roll it under your shoe.” The author includes wonderful period details, like the Farm Women’s Club setting up looms in the school’s gymnasium in order to weave rugs and blankets there during the summer. These slice-of-life moments are the book’s strongest asset, helping to sharpen what is otherwise a fairly standard and predictable sports story. Readers with ties to West Virginia may be the most suitable audience for this novel flecked with vivid local color.
A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8429169200
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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