A powerful and often haunting compilation.
Massey offers a short story collection about family members’ unpredictable lives.
This poignant, heartbreaking book offers 13 stories featuring themes of social injustice and familial grief. The strength and suffering of women, especially among the rural and working poor, fill Massey’s pages, from a mother in “Racine” who’s working at one of her two jobs when her 8-year-old son shoots a classmate with a handgun to an adolescent in “Not So Fast,” who’s forced to swimming nearly nude among hungry alligators for the entertainment of male partygoers. Other women choose to depart difficult lives on their own terms; these include a grief-stricken child in “Differences,” who, after spreading her brother’s ashes into the Grand Canyon, implores her friend Angel to push her into the ravine, and a widow in “Low Tide” who leaves her daughter behind to crawl far into the ocean after a mother turtle. Each of Massey’s characters attempts to break constraints imposed upon their lives; their tales unsettlingly look at the secrets people hide and the solace they seek. Like waves against a beach, the diverse stories flow quickly in succession, blending them into a cohesive whole. Families are at the center of these emotionally raw but tightly written narratives, which highlight the destructive power of drugs, poverty, and discrimination. And although the stories depict the experiences of unrelated characters, all are bound together as children of nature, which influences and contextualizes their actions. Natural images are present throughout the work: the ocean, a condor, and, notably, a sea turtle who, after laying her eggs, abandons them to survive as they may. The depiction of nature, in all of its wildness and danger, seems to show human problems to be manageable—our differences diminished and our hopes limitless.
A powerful and often haunting compilation.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952427-18-3
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Bronzeville Books
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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