A manically satirical but ultimately drab novel.
The lives of an eclectic cast of characters collide in Missouri Towers, a dilapidated residential building in St. Louis, in Aylott’s farcical novel.
Mike Love is a struggling real estate agent who was once a “a doppelgänger for Bruce Springsteen in his mid-eighties prime.” He speaks in cringeworthy cliches (“Mike Love is the name, real estate is the game!”), a linguistic tendency unfortunately typical of the author’s stale prose. Mike procrastinates marrying his girlfriend, Gloria McKendrick, a former trapeze artist with Ringling Brothers who now teaches at a circus school. His hesitation is exacerbated by the sudden appearance of his old high-school flame, Lizzy Winslow, “a wild, manic pixie dream girl who would never be tamed.” Both Mike and Gloria live in Missouri Towers—the residents cheekily call it “Misery Towers”—a tumbledown structure that was once a coveted address. The building serves as the stage of much of this comedic novel’s action, and as the home for most of its cast, including Mike’s boss, Daris Ballic, a Bosnian immigrant who skyrocketed to entrepreneurial success by obsessively imitating Winston Churchill. The best aspect of the book is its depiction of the building itself as a microcosm of urban decadence and blight, a symbol of St. Louis as a “fatalistic northern city in perpetual decline, lodged in a southern-looking state cursed with never-ending racial problems.” Unfortunately, the prose reads like an exasperatingly long standup routine, with one corny quip succeeding the next (a real-estate agent rival of Mike’s, Julie Titsworth, doubles as a national spokeswoman for early-onset menopause). A typical example of Aylott’s tiresome brew of comedic platitude and leaden writing reads, “America is a never-ending land of opportunity. Where else could a tacky real estate tycoon become a TV star and then leader of the free world? Where else could a C-list celebrity like Kim Kardashian, with a large ass and questionable talents, make herself into a household name, and a billionaire.” The sheer quantity of jokes crammed into the narrative is much more impressive than their quality.
A manically satirical but ultimately drab novel.Pub Date: June 14, 2024
ISBN: 9798987681213
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Beautiful Arch
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2024
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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