By turns playful and surprising and intimate, a moving meditation on being Black in America.
A Black writer's cross-country book tour becomes a profound exploration of love, friendship, and racial violence in America.
A man finds himself sprinting down the hallway of a Midwestern hotel, naked, a stranger (whose wife he's just been caught sleeping with) close on his heels. So begins our nameless narrator's book tour, which will take him around the country to promote his debut novel, Hell of a Book. As the author confronts the politics of publishing and marketing, he must answer to two very different perspectives: There are those, on the one hand, who believe in the impact of his book but wonder why he has chosen not to represent “the Black condition.” On the other hand, his media trainer advises, in a tone less flippant than sincere, that “the last thing people really want to hear about is being Black.” Meanwhile, he begins to form an unlikely friendship with a Black boy—a shadowlike, ever present 10-year-old he calls The Kid—as around them the country mourns another victim of police violence. Braided with the author’s narrative are chapters following the life of a boy referred to as Soot, which he's called by the kids in his rural Southern town on account of his very dark skin. Uncomfortable in his skin and bullied by his peers, Soot feels neither safe nor wanted in the world, withdrawing into himself and attempting to find some refuge in his imagination. When his father is murdered outside their family home, Soot finds safety in stories. As chapters alternate between the author’s and Soot’s perspectives, their narratives slowly begin to merge, unfolding into a story that is at once a paean to familial love and friendship and a reckoning with racism and police violence.
By turns playful and surprising and intimate, a moving meditation on being Black in America.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-33096-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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 tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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