Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.
A Londoner is the subject of a surreal trial in this kaleidoscopic novel.
Sterling Beckenbauer knows a thing or two about loss. “Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism,” they reflect. “Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD.” And after they’re set upon outside their flat in Camden Town in London by several bullfighters, they’re in danger of losing their freedom—while later, at a football match, they’re accosted by two police officers dressed as club officials who inform them that they’re being arrested for assaulting the bullfighters. (They later learn they’re also being charged with “forcing arresting officers to go to Hendon, Travel Zone 4, on a Saturday.”) The timing couldn’t be worse for Sterling, who’s just about to launch the latest installment of Cataclysmic Foibles—“a quarterly series of DIY artists’ plays”—with their “bestie,” Chachki Smok, a costume designer. Things then take a turn when Sterling learns that they’ll be allowed to stage the next play, but only if it also functions as their trial. And as for that trial, it’s presided over by a judge who’s “a tall, blue-bodied frog, spindly, with the head of a fledgling bird,” and the spectators include “a pig in a religious habit” and others with “frog-shaped white hearts beating in, or on, their funnel-shaped chests.” Add to all this a time-traveling doppelgänger, a spaceship, and a “PINK SPIRE WAKING UP APROPOS OF NOTHING AND COMING FOR ME WITH ITS CRUSTACEAN LIMBS AND ITS HAIR-FINE JETS,” and you have a novel that defies the laws of literary physics—Waidner seems incapable of not surprising their readers, and the novel, despite its serious themes, seems like it had to be incredibly fun to write. Still, it’s a sobering look at the way underrepresented communities—migrants, nonbinary people—are treated: “They know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a system poised against them; to be positioned as the aggressor, the danger, when having nothing, nothing, on the other side.” This novel is part Franz Kafka, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part Monty Python, but mostly it’s completely sui generis. And it succeeds on every level a novel can.
Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781644452134
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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