A novel that illuminates what the author calls “a sickening reality” but could use more dark humor.
In Miller’s satirical novel, a failing columnist at an imperiled newspaper gets unexpected help in resurrecting his career.
In director Billy Wilder’s searing film Ace in the Hole (1951), a disgraced journalist lands a job on a small Albuquerque, New Mexico, newspaper and waits for a story he can hype that will return him to the big time. Here, Nick Nolan, a former Pulitzer Prize–nominated social justice columnist for the Boston Daily Tribune, has only one month—12 columns—to turn his click total around, or the bean counters at SuperGoodMedia who just bought the centuries-old paper will banish him to the suburban beat. His fortunes change when he writes a column about Amber Abbott, an 8-year-old in a persistent vegetative state, whose mother—Nolan’s former lover—claims that the Virgin Mary speaks to her daughter. The story goes viral, attracting thousands of new subscribers, and the paper’s new publisher demands that Nick stay on top of the story. As the new owners institute rules promoting “good news,” Nick finds himself in thrall to the clicks his story generates—until he meets Benjamin Franklin in a diner. Yes, it’s the historical Benjamin Franklin, who offers his help. “You’ve hit a low point,” he says, adding, “I am here to help you and hopefully others in a profession that was so dear to me.” While reader mileage will vary on the introduction of this fantastical element, the author’s anger at the state of journalism is palpable and will speak to readers who, like Nick, see Seymour Hersh and Maggie Haberman as heroes. Satire is heightened reality, but this book too often reads like grim nonfiction, with its click-bait headlines (“She Hid Under the Bed To Spy on Her Husband but Instantly Regretted It”) and odious hedge funds buying up community newspapers, only to decimate these former pillars of the community. Still, Miller is fighting the good fight, and unlike Ace in the Hole, his tale offers a sense of hope.
A novel that illuminates what the author calls “a sickening reality” but could use more dark humor.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781637895825
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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