There’s a liminal realm in these stories between life and death, present and past, dream and memory, fate and chance.
A collection of stories that reflect the precision and balance of a high-wire aerialist.
As with the high wire, these stories require close attention; they should be read slowly and carefully. They seem to have been written that way, every step deft and deliberate. Take the opening title story. Its narrator is “I,” and he’s addressing “you” about their young son. The first reference to the titular alligator is the cartoon on the young boy’s shirt. Yet the alligator will reappear in various manifestations, and so will “I.” He says he’s telling “a story forming the sum of my life,” before quickly shifting and pivoting: “No. This never happened; it’s the wrong alligator. The wrong child, the wrong life. Sometimes I lie to myself because it’s the only clarity I seem to have when confronted by some terror no method of thinking can fathom. Lying meaningfully to answer certain sublime questions. Where the meaningfully is the new truth. A story.” So, these are stories about the essence, process, and value of storytelling. But they are also about those terrors—families falling apart, identities crumbling, tornadoes and earthquakes and industrial contamination wreaking havoc. Several stories include “David,” but there’s no evidence that these are more (or less) autofictional than the others. Life can change in an instant, with cause-and-effect consequences that might reverberate for decades. Particularly virtuosic is the dream-within-dream sequence of “Reliquary,” one of many stories of a young boy left with a single parent: “That night I dream that I am my mother dreaming about my father. I’m witnessing this but I am inside the dream, too. In it, he’s died and we’re watching him on the pallet pulled from the mudslide. It’s a vague memory, really. A bright red thread weaving through space between the real moment and the dream of the moment, which is itself no less real.”
There’s a liminal realm in these stories between life and death, present and past, dream and memory, fate and chance.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798990727502
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Cash 4 Gold Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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