A captivating debut.
A young man in Florida battles drug addiction in this striking first novel.
“Everything happened fast for years,” says the narrator of Sanchez’s debut novel, and it’s a remarkable understatement. The book starts off with the narrator, 14 years old at the time, traveling via bus from Tampa to Key West, hoping to spend time with a girl he has a crush on. He immediately encounters an older man who plies him with drugs and, along with a woman, molests him. Things don’t get much better for the narrator, who over the next several years struggles with drug addiction, spending “a couple months on the street, a couple months in jail, a couple in the psych or the halfway and back on the street again. This job, that job, always only for a couple months or weeks before something happened. Sober for a few months and then not.” He hits rock bottom so often the term loses its meaning, though eventually he gets help after experiencing a seizure, moving into a halfway house, enrolling in community college, and trying to reconcile with his estranged parents. Sanchez’s novel has the structure and tenor of an addiction memoir, though his narrator would hate to hear that (“Memoirs are whiny,” he sneers), particularly at the beginning; it takes the author a little time to find his rhythm. But once he does, he’s unstoppable, writing with an undeniable power that only occasionally gets away from him. (There are a few lines—“Everything was time soup in my head. Dumplings of memories and noodley thoughts”— that don’t quite land.) Still, the narrator is a memorable creation, vulnerable and self-aware, and Sanchez does a mostly excellent job describing the monstrous effects of drug addiction in a way that’s harrowing but never exploitative. Despite a few intermittent stumbles, it’s a compelling book.
A captivating debut.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9780358572015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
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
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