Unapologetically out there.
A fugitive writer takes up with a hippie time traveler looking for his lost love in Caulfield’s comic novel.
David Wilson’s writing career started as potential personified, his celebrated short story “The First Chapter” creating immense buzz for the brilliant novel sure to follow. When he meets Abbott, a Tom Selleck look-alike with a quasi-religious aura driving a kit-car Ferrari 308, it’s 20 years later and David is hitchhiking, alone. His advance money is gone, his wife has left him, he’s on the run from the law after embezzling university funds, and he has yet to make it past the first sentence of the second chapter of his long-awaited follow-up (“I set up my word processor in a corner to write, and nothing came. Years passed”). In Abbott, David sees an opportunity to salvage his novel; the man tells fantastical stories about looking for his missing wife, Lucille, whom he both met and lost as he traveled through time at the Woodstock music festival while traversing a universal fungal web after getting caught in the rain with five sheets of brown acid in his pocket. Abbott’s stories begin to shift to the exploits of his best friend, Denton White, who spends his time in a psych ward studying the teachings of David Carradine’s character in Kung Fu. Caulfield wears his influences on his sleeve—the novel opens like a restrained Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before segueing into a less repressive One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest–like setting while dropping references to television, including Magnum, P.I., The Incredible Hulk, and, of course, Kwai Chang Caine, throughout. These nods, along with mentions of conspiracies involving the MKUltra program and the death of Bruce Lee, lend the story a larger-than-life atmosphere. The author shows a great deal of humor in his outlandish characters but never undercuts them with his jokes. The book is upfront from the outset about its unreliable narrators, even when it plays fast and loose with who is telling the story; as strange as its premise is, the novel offers surprising insights into loss and unfulfilled expectations.
Unapologetically out there.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781963252699
Page Count: 397
Publisher: Total Genius Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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