An affecting portrait of the region and its residents, filled with love and pride.
On Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a hardworking single mom turns just-about-nothing into a rich life for her 10-year-old daughter.
As Airgood's fourth novel opens, Laurel Hill has to work an extra shift at the motel where she cleans rooms, disrupting plans to watch the Perseid meteor shower with her young daughter, Skye, who is home alone waiting—an ongoing situation which will have grave consequences later in the story. Laurel is from a local family with deep roots in the fictional but archetypal small town of Gallion on Lake Superior, but her musician mother lost the homestead where Laurel grew up to the bank. Now that place is being run by another couple as a B&B, and the threadbare life Laurel has made for herself and her daughter cleaning toilets and living in a bleak one-room rental is about to give way. Perhaps Laurel's grit, optimism, and refusal to take help from others make her a bit of a cliché, and perhaps Skye is the most perfect 10-year-old that ever lived—none of that will stop most readers from falling in love with them. And they are hardly the only characters with problems. Laurel's lifelong best friend is in an abusive relationship, her ex-boyfriend is a veteran with PTSD, a new friend has lost both a daughter and a granddaughter, a wealthier woman's marriage falls apart after her husband has brain surgery. "Better times are just around the corner," Laurel brightly assures her daughter. "Have you ever noticed how you always say that," replies Skye, "but then the corner moves?" The corner will move many more times as their story unfolds. Late in the novel, a well-meaning schoolteacher tries to convince Laurel not to move yet again, telling her "you are her home." That's nice, thinks Laurel, but this woman "had no idea what it was like, being them." Fortunately, Airgood does.
An affecting portrait of the region and its residents, filled with love and pride.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-399-16336-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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