A gloomy but eye-opening look at the startling impact of school sports.
The sudden death of a former high school football star shakes a small Texas community in Bills’ novella.
Deputy Lane Fisher works at the sheriff’s department in his hometown of Tarry, Texas. One day, he happens upon a parked van with a bloody body inside—certainly not something he witnesses every day in his small burg. Signs ultimately point to a likely suicide, but what’s even more shocking is the victim’s identity: The dead man is Lane’s high-school football teammate Clifton Baird, the so-called Tarry Tornado. His hulking size had made him a star on the football field in the early 1980s (“he was a tank that ran like a gazelle”). That all changed after a collision during practice left another player horribly injured. But was Clifton’s resultant guilt the reason his pro football career was so short? Was that why he felt suicide was his only choice? Lane reunites with old teammates and Clifton’s ex; answers to the mystery of this once-revered athlete’s fate may not be quite what the deputy expects. Bills zeroes in on the pressures that high school athletes face: The coach humiliated players during practices, and there’s a possibility that Tarry locals blamed the injured teammate for derailing a potentially stellar season. The somber narrative is layered with haunting images involving a man who couldn’t let his past go. An especially memorable scene finds Lane looking through Clifton’s home, where he had lived alone; the TV is on, playing an old football game, surrounded by VHS tapes of high-school games. The final act retains the overall bluntness of the narrative with a surprising but effective turn. Trailing this story is the bonus tale “Dead to Rights,” in which Texan Randy has a surreal experience—he wakes up in the middle of a road and runs into a Tex Cobb-lookalike with news Randy may not want to hear.
A gloomy but eye-opening look at the startling impact of school sports.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798218264642
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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