Pristinely characterized, this debut novel is by turns funny and heartrending.
A trans teen helps her English teacher through the fraught process of coming out as transgender in small-town Mitchell, South Dakota.
Thirty-five-year-old Erica Skyberg has always known she was a woman, despite the fact that she’s still Mr. Skyberg to her high school students and, well, to everyone else. Her ex-wife, Connie, with whom Erica is still in love, is pregnant by her new Trump-supporting farmer boyfriend. It’s only when 17-year-old Abigail Hawkes—spiky, foul-mouthed, outspokenly trans—transfers to Mitchell High that Erica has someone to tell her secret to. Abigail’s got enough of her own problems and complications: parents who have kicked her out, a boyfriend whose rich conservative mom is bankrolling a state political campaign for a local transphobic preacher, and Abigail’s own work as a volunteer for the preacher’s Democratic rival. (The novel is set in the autumn preceding the 2016 election, which feels long enough ago in the timeline of transgender politics as to constitute historical fiction.) As the only trans person Erica knows, Abigail reluctantly becomes her sounding board, and Erica feels guilty leaning on her; they gradually grow close even as their relationship draws scrutiny and suspicion from the people around them. Alternating primarily between Erica’s third-person chapters and Abigail’s first-person ones, St. James contrasts Erica’s attempts to be seen for who she really is with Abigail’s thwarted desire for “woodworking,” or disappearing into the woodwork to achieve the normalcy she thinks she so badly wants. (“I’ll be hiding in the walls, trying to be any other girl, like in that one story with the yellow wallpaper,” she vows.) St. James’ plot moves like a Shakespeare comedy—some contrivances, yes, but all in the service of portraying the prismatic variations of the characters here, both cis and trans, who alternately fail themselves and each other, and work to rescue them back again.
Pristinely characterized, this debut novel is by turns funny and heartrending.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781638931478
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crooked Media Reads/Zando
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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