Nails the emotional contradictions, absurdities, and cathartic surprises of modern life.
After a daredevil’s death shocks his circle, his best friend goes on an audacious quest for meaning.
Joan Didion called the aftermath of her husband’s death “the year of magical thinking.” For Lola Treasure Gold, the year after her best friend, Alex, dies is a season of sublimated grief turned metamorphosis. Though Alex is gone, his death is a sensation—he fell seven stories trying to sail a skateboard from one roof to another, witnessed by the friend who was filming. Their tight friend group is stunned, and to add to the loss, Lola knows their friendship could have been more. These are social media–savvy free spirits in LA; Alex died doing a stunt for clout—or maybe transcendence. Experimenting with her purpose and identity, and needing income, Lola starts to branch out. She gets shoved into the limelight: Someone films, remixes, and posts her semi-serious soliloquy on what Alex’s life might mean. The video takes off, and Lola attracts a growing fan base. She gets the hang of living larger online and, through a hero’s journey of adulation and cancellation, travels the path from ironic pseudo-guru in a sea of charlatans (“I’d just flown back from a secretive weeklong retreat intended to help scions of billionaire families understand how to live with themselves”) to someone who really does infuse people’s lives with sincerity and wonder. Chang draws characters with quick mastery, and writes Lola as a mille-feuille of sophistication, delighted lust, and self-doubt. The dialogue snaps and sparks, and Chang dispenses observations about race, class, feminism, sex, and influencer and tech-founder culture with panache. As the novel follows Lola’s search for a reason to live without Alex and a vision of who she could be on her own, it braids satire of rich people searching for their souls and a practicum on how to find closure, with both our living and our dead. Lola’s ache to know more about her Chinese family of origin, which turned her into a first-generation orphan half-raised by a landlord, is a poignant throughline as well. Despite sometimes fluffy revelations, Lola is a magnetic character who, despite her public life, has her most profound thoughts in private.
Nails the emotional contradictions, absurdities, and cathartic surprises of modern life.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780063416390
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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