A thoughtful tale that explores a friendship between two men trying to live authentic lives.
In Whitehouse’s debut novel, a man named Quentin “Q.” Yonally Dettweiler meets a mysterious and charismatic man who turns his life upside down—and helps him to discover his true calling.
The story’s protagonist is 26 years old and working as a health care consultant for a firm located near a California beach. Although nothing seems obviously amiss in his life, he feels unsatisfied. “I was wrapped in the carousel of a monotonous existence,” he reflects early on, “a life being lived incomplete.” However, an impromptu meeting at a coffee shop with a striking, wealthy man named James Jersig irrevocably changes the course of Q.’s life. Jersig impulsively invites him aboard his yacht for a lavish party, where he winds up hiring Q. as both an assistant and as his own personal scribe: “I’d like you to write for me each week. A piece that draws on the emotions, situations, and events from the week prior.” Working for Jersig provides Q. with a glimpse into a life of luxury, which also involves tense business dealings and potentially illegal associations. However, the major draw for Q. is the fact that Jersig seems to see him for who he is—and that he recognizes the man that he hopes to become: “What you search for is authenticity,” Jersig observes; for far too long, Q. realizes, he’s lived the life he thought he should rather than the one he wanted. Overall, this is a relatively brief book, but Whitehouse maintains a clipped pace throughout the narrative that keeps it moving forward. The story is part mystery, part philosophical musing, and it explores what it means to get a second chance at life and to seize opportunity when it comes one’s way. Much of this message is conveyed through conversations between the characters—particularly between Q., Jersig, and Jersig’s partner, Cadence. Although the text sometimes feels heavily freighted with gravitas—as when Q. writes down the question, “Is there a place in the world for a man such as me?”—it also helps propel the story and clarify plot points that might have otherwise been murky.
A thoughtful tale that explores a friendship between two men trying to live authentic lives.Pub Date: July 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0578721255
Page Count: 112
Publisher: John Barnabus Whitehouse
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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