A promising debut notable for sharp characterizations and a vividly conveyed sense of time and place.
Creative partnership or romantic relationship? Berkeley undergrads who connect over his music and her ideas about it spend eight years agonizing over which is more important.
Brickley’s first novel lovingly evokes the indie scene of the early 21st century—and lots of other pop music as well—while deftly crafting the bumpy emotional journey of her insufferably opinionated, touchingly vulnerable heroine. Narrator Percy Marks clicks with singer/songwriter Joe Morrow from the moment they bond in the fall of 2000, in classic collegiate fashion, over the distinction between “a perfect song” and “a perfect recording.” He appreciates her critiques of his songs, which they both know make them better, and when Joe’s girlfriend, Zoe, tells Percy that she’s gay, Percy moves on her long-simmering attraction to Joe. It’s definitely reciprocated, but Joe tells her he values their work together too much to complicate it. This back and forth goes on while Percy gets an MFA at Columbia and Joe tours and self-releases his first album—“with special thanks” to Percy, who told him she didn’t want co-writing credit. She’s not so sure about that decision four years later, long after she’s told him she can’t work with him anymore, when she finds a song she co-wrote on his second album, with the same evasive “special thanks” credit. Percy now lives in San Francisco, where she writes a music blog in tandem with a vintage early-aughts job as an “intelligence specialist” searching out “trendsetters” for corporate brands looking for street cred. Zoe, now her best friend and roommate, offers a running reality check on Percy’s tortured, ambivalent feelings about Joe and her future career goals as they navigate the years from 9/11 to Barack Obama’s election. Brickley’s sensitive depiction of Percy’s (very) slowly growing professional and personal self-confidence will appeal even to readers who miss most of the pop-culture references and are weary of the “will they/won’t they” plot.
A promising debut notable for sharp characterizations and a vividly conveyed sense of time and place.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799086
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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