A smart, charming debut.
A Pakistani exchange student does her best to adjust to American life in this witty coming-of-age story.
“There’s a strain of story this could fall into,” says Hira, the narrator of Amna’s debut novel. “The foreigner trying to fit in, hindered by accent and Fahrenheit and the Imperial system….The entranced documenter of America. The truth—I was bloody bored.” Hira, 16 when the novel begins, is a stranger in a not-so-strange land—she’s come from Pakistan to rural Oregon on a student exchange program. She’s heard plenty about the U.S. (“Lord, it was 2010, and everyone knew about America, the place that would upsell you on the thread count for your deathbed”), though she isn’t quite prepared for life in the tiny town of Lakeview, where her host mother, Kelly, lives with her high school–aged daughter, Amy. Hira befriends a few people at her new school, including Hamid, an Omani exchange student who’s fonder of the States than she is: “He was only mystified by the country, while I had also decided to be offended by it at every possible turn.” While Hira starts to get used to the U.S., befriending members of her school’s volleyball team, she finds herself both missing and resenting her parents, and things take a turn when tragedy strikes her family not long after she’s diagnosed with tuberculosis, forcing her to quarantine in Kelly’s house. In Hira, Amna has created a fascinating character, prickly but still vulnerable, in search of something but unsure what that might be: “I was tired of limits, aghast that life could be so small,” she reflects. Amna’s novel is a perceptive look at what home means—“It is the sole landscape of dreams, the only place that will ever convince you that its failings, its bounties, its excesses, and caresses are all your own. After all, where does it end and you begin?” This is a funny and affecting novel, understated but powerful, a wonderful new spin on the coming-of-age story.
A smart, charming debut.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9509-9449-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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