Frey’s literary affectations don’t get in the way of the good times. Let the revels begin!
A swingers’ party leads to murder in a wealthy Connecticut enclave.
After a seven-year hiatus from publishing adult fiction, Frey has found a groove with this gleefully trashy page-turner set among the one percent: four couples in the fictional town of New Bethlehem whose lives are thrown into chaos when two of the wives plan a spouse-swapping evening. (Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, The Ice Storm, lurks in the background, unnamed: “You know Key Parties were invented here.” “I’ve seen the movie, I’ve read the book.”) Their short-range goals are to sleep with someone other than their husbands (one is a sadistic nightmare, the other impotent), but there’s a long-range goal the reader won’t know about for a while. Frey is in his element here, with his signature breathless, over-the-top, unpunctuated sentences and one-sentence paragraphs; laundry lists of high-end brand names (at one meeting, people sit on Boca do Lobo sofas and Roche Bobois armchairs in Gieves & Hawkes suits); and a pharmacopeia so rich it almost gets you high to read it. (“He had cocaine from Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Pink coke from L.A., which has slight amounts of ketamine and ecstasy cut into it. He had mushrooms in raw form, in pills, in chocolate. He had twelve different strains of weed, four each of sativa, hybrid, and indica. He had ecstasy from the Netherlands. He had acid from Northern California. And he had the rarest of recreational drugs, quaaludes.”) Wild excess is everywhere, and is often played for laughs. As we happily race toward the sequenced reveals of who is murdered, who did it, and what happens to all these delightful people, Frey pauses to rhapsodize about his home state in a lyrical chapter titled “Color Fields”: “Oh, Connecticut, how beautiful you are.…Your Maples. / Sugar and Red. / In all their motherfucking glory. / And it is glorious.”
Frey’s literary affectations don’t get in the way of the good times. Let the revels begin!Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9798893310269
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Authors Equity
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
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
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