A vivid evocation of the hippie culture of early 1970s San Francisco.
The early 1970s psychedelic youth culture of San Francisco provides the setting for Cervarich’s coming-of-age crime drama.
Leah Travail leaves her failed marriage, her disapproving family, and her Memphis, Tennessee, home for a new life as an artist in the free-wheeling culture of Marin County, California, where drugs are plentiful, sex is separated from commitment, and creativity is valued over money. In this second volume of his Foxhawkseries, the author follows Leah to California, where she embraces the counterculture and is welcomed by a “family” of like-minded hippies who encourage her artistic work and introduce her to Tony Vitolinich, a young film-lighting specialist who becomes her lover and best friend. But all is not peace and love in Marin County; a random act of violence destroys Leah’s relationship with Tony. Things unravel even further when both Leah and Tony become suspects in a murder, an event that leads former federal agent turned private detective Charlie Foxhawk Carter to investigate on their behalf. The novel’s strength is its ability to conjure up a dynamic cultural and physical setting, convincingly evoking the natural beauty of Mill Valley, California, and the kaleidoscopic social atmosphere of the era. Color photographs from the period interspersed throughout the book enhance the reader’s ability to grasp the unique ambience (“No adjoining houses can be seen. Nestled in a grassy meadow on the rise of a hill behind the house is a wooden water-storage tank bound together with heavy metal hoops. Wildflowers are blooming in the meadow”). Yet these elements are also a weakness at times, since they distract from a narrative that, as a result, takes too long to unfold. The author is right to include descriptions of the casual drug culture, especially as they relate to the plot, but readers may tire of their repetitive quality. Overall, this is a solid follow-up to the series’ first installment, but a tighter story would make later additions more enticing.
A vivid evocation of the hippie culture of early 1970s San Francisco.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781734602470
Page Count: 329
Publisher: San Francisco Bay Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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