An uneven pair of brief, brooding works from the ’80s.
South collects two one-act plays in this volume.
In these two short works, the playwright’s characters reflect on traumas in their lives and mistakes they’ve made along the way. “Precious Blood” follows two people haunted by a terrible crime from a few years before. Unc works as a kitchen installer, one of the last people standing in a family marred by mental illness and early death. After his brother and sister-in-law were killed in freak accidents, Unc’s teenage niece, Melody, came to live with him in his trailer in rural Missouri. Connie was a woman who served in the Big Sisters program, who was assigned to Melody’s case, and the three of them formed a sort of temporary family, although the nurse felt like an outsider, nonetheless: “these two were like a couple of people off The Hollywood Squares,” she recalls of the girl and her uncle. “Full of in-jokes and camaraderie, and ready to tell me anything about them or anything else. We ate hot ham sandwiches on white bread with mustard, drank cokes and laughed a lot.” The family’s tragedies weren’t finished, however, and Unc and Connie are left behind to contemplate the result. In “Rattlesnake in a Cooler,” Doc is a doctor from Kentucky who always wanted to travel to the American Southwest. The dream never left him, and it led to his walking away from his wife and practice and getting a job on a dude ranch in Colorado. He hooked up with a cowboy named Jim, and the two of them set off on an adventure that quickly gets out of hand. Recounted by Doc in the present day, who’s at the end of his rope, the play is a meditation on the romance and danger of the modern Wild West. In both plays, the act of telling becomes more than mere narrative—through it, the characters seek some level of understanding, either from their audience or within themselves.
With only four speaking characters between the two plays—none of whom speak to one another—the works are typified by long soliloquies. There’s a pleasant, rambling rhythm to the language, particularly in “Rattlesnake in a Cooler”: “But my road was all planned out and smoothed for me, had been for as long as I could remember, all I had to do was keep walking, stay married, have kids, get wealthy, start to twitch, and get palsy as the walls closed in.” The plays were originally performed onstage in the early 1980s, including runs directed by the famed Robert Altman, and the book includes several black-and-whitephotographs from various performances. One can imagine actors making a meal of South’s words, which are full of pathos and violence. But although he manages to construct compelling fictional worlds, both plays feel a bit limited. Their recounted nature robs them of some urgency, and the despair of their revelations—at least on the page—fails to elicit a very powerful emotional response.
An uneven pair of brief, brooding works from the ’80s.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73538-200-5
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Rattlesnake Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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