A strong premise set amid the Black Panther Party falters in its execution.
A coming-of-age story mixes Black Panther Party ideals with besotted romance.
It’s 1968 and Nettie Boileau, the beautiful, orphaned daughter of a murdered Haitian doctor, arrives in Oakland, eager to assist with the first free medical outreach of the Black Panther Party. “If she couldn’t do this, then what point was there in even living?” 20-year-old Nettie asks herself, in a story built of breathless interior rumination. Her best friend, Clia Brown, is crushing on her, but the novel’s opening scene supplies Nettie with another reason to exist when she “lock[s] eyes” with the capable Panther Party captain, Melvin Mosley. He has been called in to dispatch the racists menacing the home of a boy with sickle cell anemia, but “what distressed her the most was how handsome he was.” In due course, Melvin will give Nettie a gun and a pregnancy, two time-honored plot devices. Nettie takes both to the Midwest, following Melvin to his assignment to help open an Illinois chapter of the party. Young Nettie soaks up the rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael; she “caught those words like falling rain, swallowed them like holy water.” But the high of revolutionary ardor precedes the low of Melvin’s infidelities and the bitter winters of Chicago. Worse, the FBI moves in to shut down the Panthers, and it’s Nettie and her body that pay the price. Josaphat, a Haitian-born writer living in South Florida, quotes Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and James Baldwin to strong effect. Police are “pigs” here, and the Panthers’ newspaper “was like a portal,” reporting “who in the community had been imprisoned, whose death went uninvestigated, whose bail needed to be posted, and who needed legal assistance.” The author is drawing clear parallels between police violence then and now. In her acknowledgements, Josaphat writes that she has “always been fascinated by the minds of radicals.” Unhappily, her cliched prose makes a poor container for the history she reveres.
A strong premise set amid the Black Panther Party falters in its execution.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781643755885
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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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