Albert offers much to mull on the ethics of reproduction and the many permutations of inheritance.
As her creative powers ripen around the release of her fourth album, Womb Service, alt-folk-punk-blues anti-darling Aviva Rosner is consumed by the frustrated need to have a baby twinned with a spiraling obsession with the late Amy Winehouse.
Embarking on tour for what's hoped to be her breakout album, Aviva grapples with the eternal quandary of having it all and of keeping what's expected of her in balance with what she desires: She wants a successful music career while maintaining creative control; she wants to come home to her almost-textbook-perfect husband while indulging the occasional boundary-pushing dalliance; she wants a baby born of her own body without the intrusion of conventional medicine; veneration without the destruction of runaway fame; leaving a legacy without it being twisted to others' purposes. Albert catalogs the nitty-gritty rise and fall of each menstrual cycle, each recurring anxiety, each lapse into rumination on the death and, Aviva believes, widespread misunderstanding of the iconic Winehouse, each yoni steam and psychedelic journey undertaken in service of a dream that feels like a birthright denied, and traveling alongside Aviva on the long, fraught road of infertility can induce in the reader a feeling of claustrophobic recrudescence, like you're trapped in it all in real time. Aviva is someone many have known—or been—a version of, barreling through nuance with a dubiously informed politics and worldview yet a (nearly) unshakeable conviction in her own rectitude and righteousness, embodying that well-worn saying, "I was a perfect parent before I had children" (sub parent with any number of other occupations prone to abuse by the public), talented yet simultaneously under- and overconfident. Still, as often as Aviva's anxieties and flaws—and they are considerable (and not always handled with the narrative berth needed to avoid a creeping sense of complicity in the reader)—are fed by various lopsided satellites in her orbit, they're also checked by moments of real insight from wiser (and often ignored) figures in her life who attempt to insulate her against fully self-obliterating in a monomaniacal blaze.
Albert offers much to mull on the ethics of reproduction and the many permutations of inheritance.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982167-86-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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