The characters and themes at the center of this story don’t quite deliver.
A woman dissatisfied with her present circumstances seeks solace in a past situationship.
At 37, Zuzu lives in New York with her high-powered attorney wife, Agnes, and their son, Gideon, and her resentment grows with every email Agnes sends. When Gideon is invited to spend the weekend with a friend, Zuzu and Agnes plan a trip to Massachusetts to check on Agnes’s ex-girlfriend, who’s had a health scare, and visit Zuzu’s college friend and eternal crush, Cash, who lives nearby. Then Zuzu’s estranged father dies, so they fold his memorial service into their plans. Grief, nostalgia, and midlife ennui drive Zuzu to act out. The novel moves from the present to Zuzu’s college escapades with Cash to her meet-cute with Agnes. Zuzu fell in love with Agnes in law school, and while Agnes excelled in her career, Zuzu failed the bar twice. Narrating the story, Zuzu explains that all she’s ever really wanted is to be desired. She pines for Cash, whose marriage also seems to be faltering. Though she loves Agnes, she frames their life together as a consolation prize to what her life could have been with Cash had he only wanted her the way she still so desperately needs him to. The weekend forces Zuzu to confront how little she’s grown in two decades. Much of the story relies on happenstance: First, Zuzu’s father dies. Then, it just so happens that Noel, the only other biracial person Zuzu knew growing up, attended the same college she did and now lives in the apartment above her sister’s house. Zuzu is his obsession, and he’s always on hand for her to toy with, the same way Cash toys with her. Zuzu’s experience of race is regularly referenced without being fully explored, stunting an otherwise engaging throughline. Finally, a sudden repair required in Cash’s house leads his wife and daughter to leave town for the weekend. He conveniently stays behind, alone in a hotel. It’s fine, necessary even, for characters to behave badly, and for coincidence to play a part, but they should do so in interesting ways.
The characters and themes at the center of this story don’t quite deliver.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851609
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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