A wonderfully humorous blend of James Bondand Don Quixote.
A patient at a mental facility who believes he is a British spy stumbles upon a villain’s far-reaching conspiracy.
James Flynn has been a patient at City of Roses Psychiatric Institute in California for 18 years, the entire time believing he is a special agent in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The Don Quixote–esque Flynn grow up watching 1960s espionage films with such obsessive zeal they overtook his identity. He meets fellow patient Chloe Jablonski, an actor involuntarily committed for a suicidal drug overdose. She maintains she was roofied and raped by powerful movie producer Gary Goldhammer. Since he believes she has proof of the crime, Goldhammer pursues her, providing Flynn with yet another reason to spring into action. As it turns out, Goldhammer is an evil, egomaniacal man who has plans, employing a new technology, “to take over the mind of every person in America.” The author deftly presents the comically implausible—and uproariously funny—as credible; Flynn is insane, disconnected from reality, and undeniably brave and resourceful. “He was built for war.” He also has a peculiar penchant for finding genuine conspiracies and thwarting them, raising questions about the very strange nature of Flynn’s psychosis. Even though the plot is riddled with the darkest themes—violence, rape, mental illness—the novel remains more comic than tragic, even downright silly, and never truly disturbing. And Flynn is a compelling protagonist, as charming as he is unhinged, a handsome man who “was built like Jean-Claude Van Damme and moved like Bruce Lee.” For those readers in search of a farcical book that is intelligently rendered, this is a delightful novel, hilarious and inventive.
A wonderfully humorous blend of James Bondand Don Quixote.Pub Date: June 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68433-967-9
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2022
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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