An offbeat, mordantly entertaining but discordant saga of war at its worst and its cutest.
A small-town Vietnam veteran is beset by PTSD and talking rodent soldiers in this tragicomic fantasia.
Bull River Falls, Colorado, population 875, is experiencing a summer of discontent, with raging forest fires, strangely aggressive wildlife, the Gold Gulch Corporation’s controversial expansion of its ski resort and golf course, and the mysterious gunshot death of a young woman. Surveying it all is Stan Przewalski, the 60-something editor of the Beacon-News, but he’s an unreliable observer. His psychiatric meds barely control his nightmares about Vietnam, which bleed into hallucinatory daytime flashbacks, and he’s alive only because the rope that he recently hanged himself with broke. He takes it in stride when he meets Chaz, a gopher who, thanks to exposure to radioactive testing, can outthink and outtalk most humans and magically shrink large objects—including Stan—down to his foot-long scale. Hallucination or not, Chaz deeply resonates with Stan’s past: He loves 1960s rock and has organized his fellow gophers into an army with miniaturized attack helicopters and fighter jets. Nikolich’s fanciful scenario makes up most of this meandering novel, which consists mainly of Stan wrestling with his Vietnam demons while taking in Chaz’s diminutive parody of human culture and warfare. Stan occasionally joins the gophers’ attacks on Gold Gulch, which is trying to drive them off their land. The resulting yarn is imaginative and often beguiling, like a mashup of Platoon and Gremlins scripted by William S. Burroughs. But it is also awkwardly dissonant, with the gophers’ cartoon antics—“They then synced the upstairs elevator door alarms to the hospital PA system, which had already been programmed by a team of prairie dog sound engineers to play a continuous loop of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock rendition of the Star Spangled Banner”—clashing tonally with Stan’s pitch-black memories of combat. (“I was covered with blood….I walked up to the first one and took his head off. I emptied half the ammo belt into that bunch.”) Many scenes clearly take place in Stan’s dreams or imagination and therefore feel inconsequential and uninvolving. Still, the author is a gifted writer, and when he looks outside Stan’s head—“The old woman and the horse faced into the wind and together they watched the smoke rise and hang in gauzy white sheets above the valley”—his prose is entrancing.
An offbeat, mordantly entertaining but discordant saga of war at its worst and its cutest.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-573-2
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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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