An inventive novel about grief, climate change, and academia.
An ethics professor leads her students through an exercise with real-world implications in Baden’s novel.
Professor Iris Tate teaches moral philosophy at a British university, where she hopes to apply her discipline to the crisis of climate change. She’s just received an intriguing request from the Crown Prosecution Service: a murder has occurred in a closed committee on climate, but prosecuting the murderer would give the powers that be an excuse to kill an important climate policy recently passed by the committee. Would Iris be willing to put the question of whether the state should prosecute to her students, since, after all, young people have the greatest stake in the outcome? In the past, Iris has used students as guinea pigs on behalf of corporate studies, but this is the first time she’s ever been asked to weigh in on a murder investigation (the students will have no idea the case is a real one). Iris, reeling from the recent death of her wife, is desperate to take on a project with meaning—plus, the school is pushing professors to be more entertaining in the classroom, and what’s more entertaining than a murder mystery? As Iris walks her students through a simulated version of the real case, she is forced to reckon with the losses and compromises in her life that have brought her to this position. It turns out ethical dilemmas abound at every stage of the process, and Iris might not be the disinterested arbiter she aspires to be. Iris narrates her struggles with a dry humor, as here when discussing one of her fictional suspects: “His medications may have combined with his cannabis smoking and prior issues to tip him over the edge. I asked whether we should hold him morally responsible for his actions, even if they include murder. It wasn’t my best class, but this is more of a legal question anyway.” Less a traditional mystery novel than a philosophy-driven campus tale, the book satisfies as an extended thought exercise with a relatable human center.
An inventive novel about grief, climate change, and academia.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781739088996
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Habitat Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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