Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre.
Bizarre short stories from a Texan with a punk-rock heart.
Austin author Flores’ first two books, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas (2018) and Tears of the Trufflepig (2019), have already made him something of a cult favorite among readers who appreciate his frequently funny, almost always bizarre punk-rock sensibilities. His new collection is set in the same off-kilter world as his previous works, but it also expands on it. In “You Got It, Take It Away,” named after the legendary Tejano singer Johnny Canales’ catchphrase, a Mexican American man encounters his difficult, probably racist neighbor, who shows him a mysterious piece of cloth that defies the laws of the natural world. When he asks about it later, the neighbor becomes belligerent, convinced the man had broken into his apartment. The story ends on a surprisingly sweet note—Flores doesn’t sacrifice compassion for the sake of weirdness. “The 29th of April” is grounded more firmly in reality—painfully so. The narrator chronicles the descent of a town into gang violence: “The reporters stopped coming when we started finding them dead,” the narrator reflects. The story is told mostly in one long paragraph, giving it an exhausting kind of urgency; it’s both beautiful and intensely heartbreaking. All the stories here are excellent, but the best is perhaps “Pheasants,” in which a coffee shop worker named Tito Papel encounters an angel stuffing their face with a discarded piece of birthday cake; Tito asks them to leave, but they keep coming back, and the two banter good-naturedly about language and theology. The cake-loving spirit denies they’re Tito’s guardian angel, but the ending suggests they might have been playing it coy. Flores’ prose is a delight throughout the book, and his love for the unearthly always feels natural, never self-conscious. One character reflects, “Strange stories had helped me give meaning to the painful moments of survival, and strange stories were the only things I could continue feeding into the machine.” Could that be Flores’ own manifesto? Whether it is or not, his own strange stories are some of the best to come along in quite a while. This is an accomplished book from an author determined to keep literature weird.
Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0413-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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