Totalitarianism really can bring out the worst in people, suggests this eye-catching debut.
Twin Soviet ballerinas, born and orphaned on a single day in 1941, wreak havoc on each other’s lives.
It’s often said that love and hate are not opposites but closely related states, divided only by the proverbial thin line. Durham’s debut explores that idea through an operatic melodrama of a plot, boldly layered over a scaffolding of historical fact. In the opening scene, with the Siege of Leningrad in the offing, a 19-year-old dancer with no partner and no family goes through the throes of labor in a drab communal apartment. An hour later, a friend named Katusha arrives to find two infants wailing between the feet of a corpse. She grabs the girls, names them Maya and Natasha, and jumps on the last train to Tashkent to wait out the war. Fast forward 17 years: The girls are about to graduate from the feeder academy for the prestigious Kirov ballet when big news arrives. The Kirov plans to bring on a few new dancers ahead of an upcoming European tour, but to (hopefully) prevent defection, only one member of a family can join. Everyone knows it will be Natasha, the more gifted and popular sister—and no one can possibly imagine what’s ahead in this novel’s tornado of a plot. Durham provides an author’s note confirming the truth of the historical detail underlying the drama. Exchange visits of Russian and American ballet companies were indeed underway when the Cuban missile crisis broke; nearly all the details and characters involved here in the filming of the epic Soviet version of War and Peace come from life. Durham’s storytelling bravado is buttressed by impressive proclamations: "Only three things can be depended on in this world: that hemlines will rise and fall, that regimes will come and go, and that people will never change. This is why the Russians went on doing many of the same things under Brezhnev that they had under Khrushchev, which they’d also done under Stalin, which were the same things people everywhere have always done, no matter who exploited them: getting toothaches and falling in love, scolding their children and singing in taverns...writing terrible poetry and believing, even though they knew better, that some sort of brilliant fate awaited them."
Totalitarianism really can bring out the worst in people, suggests this eye-catching debut.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780063393615
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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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