A harrowing, dislocating novel of warfare and its aftermath.
A draftee struggles to make sense of the Vietnam War in Quinnett’s literary novel.
Jim’s number has finally been called. The Southern California native has spent the last few years moving between colleges while attempting to avoid the draft, but his luck has run out. He’s just arrived in Vietnam to fight in a war he does not believe in, and his only goal is to get back home alive. He’s assigned to a communications unit in the 1st Air Cavalry Division, and within 24 hours he’s already flown his first combat mission. He quickly descends into the hell that is frontline fighting: Viet Cong ambushes, ad hoc village brothels, soldiers’ cruelty directed at civilians, and the desensitizing violence that becomes part of his daily life. There are vividly described surreal moments, like riding on the skid of a helicopter a thousand feet off the ground, or smoking marijuana pilfered from the knapsack of a killed Viet Cong soldier. Jim manages to stay alive when so many others do not, but he returns home to an America that feels newly alien to him. Quinnett’s lively prose is laden with profanity and violent imagery, but the changes in Jim are marked in subtle ways, as by his sudden shift in reading material—he starts favoring pulp novels over the Tolstoy he brought with him in his footlocker. (“Ain’t no time for thinking and pondering,” he muses. “Every free second, every time the column stopped, every sit-down in the Nam, I’d swing that pack off my shoulder, undo the flap on the rucksack, and grab a bit of Neverland.”) The novel’s structure cannily echoes the experience of Jim’s tour—the story is told in vignettes with no overarching plot, and characters come and go. Quinnett collects disconnected moments, as if challenging readers to make more meaning from them than Jim is able to.
A harrowing, dislocating novel of warfare and its aftermath.Pub Date: March 29, 2024
ISBN: 9798989929207
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Guthrie-Pierce Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 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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