An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.
A troubled teen experiences the freedoms and dangers of 1960s California youth culture in Isaak’s coming-of-age novel.
It’s 1969, four years since Rick Leibnitz’s mother fled their Redlands, California, home, taking his younger brother and sister away to escape beatings by Rick’s father. Fifteen-year-old Rick and his father have long “discarded any pretense of trying to get along.” His father tries to forcibly cut Rick’s long hair and reveals that Rick is his “only son.” For Rick, it’s an epiphany: “I almost laughed. The way I felt about him, how could I blame her? I’d leave me too.” Later, Rick is sitting outside his house when 17-year-old Stacy Slater, one of many girls who star in his masturbatory fantasies, stumbles up to a neighbor’s door. After no one answers, Stacy and Rick go to a nearby orange grove, where he loses his virginity to her. Stacy asks Rick to stash her drugs, and he gets picked up by the cops shortly thereafter. Sent to juvenile detention, Rick refuses to rat on Stacy and again resists getting a haircut. Leo Malheur, Rick’s “tall and coal-black” probation officer, brokers his release, although Rick’s father, who has moved to nearby Yucaipa, now plans to send Rick to military school the following year. Lincoln Ellard, a charismatic classmate at Rick’s Yucaipa school, helps Rick avoid this fate. The boys get a house together, where Lincoln leads intellectual “salon” discussions and lets Rick in on his drug running operations. Rick enjoys a psychedelic summer of sex and drugs until trouble arises, leading to another jail stint and new information that inspires him to hit the road to reconnect with his mother.
The articulate and introspective narrator observes and engages in a “trippy” world reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, substituting the groovy late 1960s for the go-getter 1980s. As Rick muses at the end of the novel: “There were sick people among us, just as in any other generation, and hair and clothes and attitudes and drugs for them were nothing more than disguises they had donned. What had been glorious craziness in the summer looked more like actual madness in the fall.” The book packs a lot of characters and subplots into its pages, including finely etched moments focused on Rick’s probation officer, who strives for justice, is subject to racist remarks, and is in danger of being drafted. Lincoln is a marvelously drawn flawed-prophet figure who ultimately realizes he’s been “dangerously naïve.” The narrative very effectively captures a male teen’s sex-on-the-brain obsession with girls yet also fleshes out its female characters with thoughts and problems of their own. A particularly memorable sequence concerns a “pulling a train” event (group sex with one female and multiple male partners taking turns) at a party and the subsequent perspectives of both the girl involved and the girls who watched it happen.
An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781958840047
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Utamatzi Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
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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