A scrappy, exciting, liquor-fueled journey through Austin, Texas.
A Vietnam War veteran dives into Austin’s burgeoning music scene while pursuing a law career in Keith’s novel.
After recovering from an injury sustained fighting in the Vietnam War, Sanders Eden attends Texas Tech on the GI Bill. He doesn’t quite fit with the crowd in Lubbock, so when it’s time to choose a law school, he heads to Austin. What really excites him is Austin’s music scene; it’s the ’70s, and the venues are scrappy, loud, and amazing. Sanders (Sandy to friends) lives it up at Antone’s, Liberty Lunch, Hole in the Wall, Armadillo World Headquarters, and other local spots. Bar fights, meeting girls, the amazing array of musicians—it’s a whirlwind of blurry, drunken, and memorable nights. Fatefully, Sandy eventually meets Bev, a young academic. She later recalls, “I got to Austin in 1986 and eventually found Sanders, another breed of southern man—one fiery, physical, intellectually alive, and with a modern social conscience.” They marry, and as Sandy’s law career takes off, a personal injury case keeps his name in the papers. But it’s a whistleblower that really puts Sandy in the middle of Austin’s combustible political scene as an explosive ethics case hits close to home and tests Sandy and Bev both personally and professionally. Keith’s boisterous, rollicking story starts with a bang and never really slows down. The protagonist is pursuing a legal career, but that doesn’t stop him from jumping into the middle of the whiskey-fueled action, whether at a honkytonk or in a courtroom. The descriptions of the Austin of yore, with its myriad musicians and nightspots, feel earthy and real, striking a strong note of authenticity. The novel is not perfect—the chapters are told from different perspectives, and they are not always labeled, causing confusion. The second half of the narrative is more about legal and political issues, and the plot can get lost as the writing bogs down in related details.
A scrappy, exciting, liquor-fueled journey through Austin, Texas.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798891326361
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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