Daring plots with evocative prose and complex characters.
Searle’s short stories delve into the emotional messiness of the human experience.
This collection gathers slice-of-life vignettes that explore the complex and often untidy nature of emotion, with plots that range from mundane encounters to more dramatic events. “The Quiet Car,” in which a woman on a routine Amtrak ride loses her cool at her fellow passengers after receiving bad news, is followed by “Student Shooter,” in which a playwriting professor who longs to have a child becomes close to a disturbed student. Searle’s focus on conflicting emotions is especially evident in “When You Watch Me,” the story of Evvy, a 17-year-old in 1980s Arizona. She becomes infatuated with her summer college course professor, Barry; when she loses her virginity to Barry in his pool, his wife hides nearby and takes photos. Later, the wife mails the pictures to a now-adult Evvy. Though she was exploited, Evvy also derives a complicated sense of power from the experience. The titular story, “The Drama Room,” compellingly explores similar themes: In the 1980s, when PJ is a techie for her school’s drama department, the director, Ms. L., begins an inappropriate relationship with the show’s teenage star, Freddy. PJ—like most of Searle’s characters—takes the path of least resistance, laughing it off, only to regret the choice later. The Covid-19 pandemic is a motif that recurs throughout the work. “The Mask of the Red Death” follows a Massachusetts high school senior during the quarantine lockdown. Not taking the pandemic seriously, she spends spring break in Florida with friends. When she returns home, she is diagnosed with Covid-19; after unwittingly spreading the virus to her grandfather, she is isolated by her grief and depression. This story illustrates Searle’s ability to deftly capture a youthful voice in her prose: “They all stopped talking to you…when they asked you not to mention Grandad…Which you (coward that you are) didn’t wind up doing anyways, not wanting to get known as Arlington’s Typhoid-Whoever.”
Daring plots with evocative prose and complex characters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781965784310
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Pierian Springs Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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