If Chuck Palahniuk and Stephenie Meyer teamed up to write a spec script for Succession, this is what you might get.
This skewering of Silicon Valley startup culture is biting satire—complete with fangs.
Set in San Narciso, a barely fictionalized version of San Francisco, the story follows Chuck Gross, the disappointing scion of a billionaire who made his money the old-fashioned way: arms and labor exploitation. Chuck thinks he’s eager to separate himself from his family—he’s changed his name from Charles Grossheart and started a punk record label (secretly funded with family money, natch)—but everything changes when he’s actually cut off financially. He catches a break when he’s hired as a “creative consultant” by his college friend Olivia Watts, known as “Steve Jobs, but with a heart” in this fictional Silicon Valley. The one catch is that she would like the Grosshearts to invest. While Chuck doesn’t mind helping his family acquire more wealth, he quickly realizes that her startup’s “world-changing medical technology” is working toward the goal of “remov[ing] all human expiration dates” through means that are less scientific and more Nosferatu. Even as the perennial black sheep, Chuck has to decide if he can really involve his family in a plan that Bram Stoker couldn’t have dreamed up. It’s a clever idea, and as in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, it’s a bit hard to tell where the line between satire and reality lies. If it turned out that the buzzy weight-loss drug Ozempic were derived from vampires, would people actually stop taking it? It’s hard to imagine a world where rich folks offered a shot at immortality and incredible wealth wouldn’t take it, even if it came with insatiable bloodlust. While the plot takes a while to unfurl and Chuck, who seems to embody the concept of “failing upwards,” is not exactly relatable, anyone who enjoyed the delicious schadenfreude of the Theranos trial will get a kick out of this book.
If Chuck Palahniuk and Stephenie Meyer teamed up to write a spec script for Succession, this is what you might get.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593469675
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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