An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more.
A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future.
In a narrative that’s long on rich description and has a playful love of language, the protagonist, Slide, is a young man with a problem: He lives in a seedy neighborhood where orphans steal his socks from the laundromat and one of his roommates sneaks into his bedroom at night for reasons unclear but likely untoward. Confronted by preteen hoodlums who demand to know which gang he swears allegiance to—“You run with Gulag? Uncle Death? One Shot? Diablos? Why’re you wearing shorts?”—Slide decides to find his own place in a better part of Polis, about which his roomie warns him, “Polis is a friend to no one. It will only take what you give and spit back the bones, even your past, which it holds in reserve to taunt you.” That’s just so, and as Slide goes out into the city, moving from one pitiless zone to the next, he meets some extremely odd characters, such as a hot dog vendor who demands that he eat a suspicious-looking tube steak before proceeding (“Can’t help the streets if you ain’t buying the meats!”) and a tent-city denizen decked out in two tracksuits even in the “June heat that wrapped our throats like pythons.” Finally Slide reaches a part of town “where the light shines brighter,” where the coffee shops have dozens of varieties of beans and “everyone’s clothes were of a higher thread count”—a paradise that’s inaccessible to him. Like Dante, Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable, with characters who dispense rough and memorable wisdom to help survive an ominous future; as one Uglygod instructs: “You don’t step into a snake’s mouth because it says it’s got its teeth pulled.”
An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781952119743
Page Count: 502
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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
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