A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.
Twelve stories illuminate the lives of Black women in the contemporary Deep South and Appalachia.
The vividness of the situations and personalities, the sparkling distraction of brand names and status details, the intrusion of technology moments like an Apple Watch pinging with a bill reminder at a funeral—all of these, plus a healthy dose of dark humor, act to make the full force of the dissatisfaction and anger that drive Hill’s debut collection slow to be fully perceived. In the first story, “Seeking Arrangements,” a young woman is on a Greyhound bus with an older white man she met on a dating site. Supposedly he “created Myspace before Myspace,” though she can’t verify this with Google. “He calls me his ‘mutt’ and ‘little hot thing.’ He says he’s only teasing. He likes to chat on Yahoo! email. He thinks I’d look good with a shaved head.” Now he's convinced her to travel 22 hours from Nashville to Florida to visit his mother in “a Presbyterian retirement community with gates that keep people like me out.” She’s minding his vast array of medication (he says he’s too ill to fly) but in truth has no idea what she’s doing there and fantasizes about running off with Lakeisha, the bus driver. The story “The Best Years of Your Life” is narrated by the admissions officer of an unaccredited university in a former Sears building, a woman who puts equal energy into luring student prey and excoriating herself for being involved with this scam. The people who come to her—like a weathered white woman who dreams of a law degree that will help her get her son out of federal prison—often believe they have received a sign. “That sign,” she explains, “is nothing more than cache cookies tracking their 1 a.m. Googles: ‘how to start over’ or ‘how to go back to school with a 1.9 gpa.’ ” This story is where the title phrase comes up, more or less as a knife in the gut. “You’re a good woman,” the “World’s Best Meemaw” tells the narrator. “Your kindness is changing us, we won’t forget it.” Other characters are tormented by pregnancy (unwanted, ill-starred), weight control, evangelical faith, screwed-up mothers and fathers, and police brutality and are unable to find the comfort others do in Pema Chödrön, nontoxic cleaning supplies, or White Claw.
A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9798885740173
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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