McKenzie has created a wonderful addition to the crew of damaged characters beloved by readers, so very endearing and real.
When her mad-scientist grandmother waves a gun at Meals on Wheels, Penny Rush is called to Santa Barbara, where her adventures begin.
The unattributed epigraph of this book—"For a while I went berserk, and wished it would never end..."—is eventually revealed to be an excerpt from the journal of one of the characters. One suspects it also reflects McKenzie's state of mind while writing this delightful narrative, and it soon becomes relatable for the enchanted reader. Sadly, no matter how many times you try to pause so it won't be over, it still ends—with a decent outcome for its protagonist, thank heaven, because by that time you will be fully in love with Penny, a socially awkward, deeply idiosyncratic misfit with trauma in her past, somewhere on the spectrum between Elizabeth Zott of Lessons in Chemistry and Eleanor Oliphant of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. "In the past twenty-four hours," she says at the outset, "I’d abruptly left my job, burning a bridge that I was happy to cross for the last time, and I’d confronted my husband Sherman: I know all about Bebe Sinatra and the cocaine." She's picked up at the Santa Barbara train station by Burt Lampey, her grandmother Dr. Pincer's accountant, a toupéed teddy bear of a man who drives a battered Econoline van he calls the Dog of the North. His other dog is a Pomeranian known as Kweecoats, though his collar tag says QUIXOTE, surely a nod to the original picaresque novel of which this is a gleeful descendant. As Dr. Pincer's situation becomes increasingly fraught, Penny's attention is distracted by her grandfather. With his second wife kicking him out of the house, he asks Penny to accompany him to Australia to make one last search for her parents, who disappeared into the Outback five years earlier. Their experiences there will compete in death-defying drama with Penny's childhood memory of being saved from an untimely watery demise by a talking fish. “Are you a grunion?” she asks him, once safe on the beach. “I’m a false grunion. It’s all a big mistake,” he tells her. “I know what that’s like,” she replies.
McKenzie has created a wonderful addition to the crew of damaged characters beloved by readers, so very endearing and real.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-30069-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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