This engaging debut novel takes a thought-provoking look at time travel.
A middle-aged woman frustrated with her life learns that change isn’t always good in Somers’ whimsical time-travel tale.
Marcia Farrar loses her Italian lover when she is young and pregnant. A settlement awarded after his death helps to support the single mother as she raises their son Howie while working at various dead-end jobs, but it also ties her to the town of Round Stone, home to her rival and former foster sister, Nina. Marcia unexpectedly finds herself an empty nester when Howie receives and accepts a linguistics fellowship. Marcia worries about Howie, who leaves to conduct research on What Island, near Kanz-_ika, which is run by a murderous dictator. Then, her ancient dog Orson dies just after Howie’s departure. The grieving Marcia takes him to a pet crematorium, where, instead of Orson’s cremains, she receives the ashes of Mr. Whiskey, a cat who soon reconstitutes himself. Mr. Whiskey, in addition to being able to communicate telepathically with Marcia, can also time travel. (“This was ridiculous. She was talking to an ash-cat about the fact that they’d just time-tripped back to the past.”) He convinces her that they should use his ability to return to her college years in Chicago and attempt to change the direction of her life. It takes some time for the pair to get the hang of what they’re doing—it’s an engaging trial-and-error adventure for the lonely woman and her new feline best friend. Somers cannily builds this narrative on an everywoman battered by adversity; Marcia has always rolled with the punches while managing to provide a good childhood for her precocious son, so it’s easy for readers to appreciate her wish for a better life. She also employs a clever structure for her tale, blending the present and flashback sections with segments from the memoirs of author Socraties Love (a friend of Marcia’s father) and Internet search results from The Information Hatch (think Google). Readers must assemble all the clues to uncover the path that Marcia has been manipulated into following throughout the book—it’s an often tortuous journey, but well worth the trip.
This engaging debut novel takes a thought-provoking look at time travel.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798990240506
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Stylite Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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