A meta-novel that stings and touches the reader.
Impudent humor, dark farce, and the looming threat of violence somehow merge in jittery tandem in this novel, along with a pair of storylines about Black writers on book tours—and in personal upheaval.
On the one hand, there’s Soot, a Black writer who is “the age of early evening bedtimes and early morning ibuprofen.” (In other words, 44 years old.) He’s visiting Minnesota in the dead of winter, away from home to promote his new book, and one senses from the start that it isn’t just the snowy, frigid air that’s making him shudder. On the other hand, there’s a younger, friskier National Book Award–winning Black writer, also on a literary tour, in the more temperate climes of southern Europe. Neither the latter’s age nor name are specified here. But he’s perfectly OK with people who mistake him for Ta-Nehisi Coates or Colson Whitehead or even Walter Mosley. (“Turns out I can be anybody you want me to be if I’m just willing to say the words.”) These mercurial men are the dual (if not dueling) protagonists in this latest from Mott, a follow-up of sorts to his 2021 National Book Award–winning novel, Hell of a Book, in which Soot appeared in younger form, growing up in North Carolina. Soot spends most of his narrative here bouncing back in time to when he was still happily married, and his daughter was still alive. Inferences of the tragic calamity that took Soot’s daughter’s life intrude on the public and private moments of his tour. Meanwhile, the other author is having a time of it overseas as he’s embraced by a rich and famous Frenchman who offers him lasting wealth if he never returns to the U.S. As this transaction plays out, the author meets an enigmatic young man named Dylan who hates it when the author calls him “Kid” (and who also seems a carryover from Mott’s previous book) along with an effusive Black giant who loves H.P. Lovecraft and speaks with a Scottish brogue. The younger author is also being marked for death by a madman named Remus—the latter development compelling the author to secure a firearm. Indeed, guns are the subtext that link both narratives, along with the trauma they instill in those who witness and survive their malign use. The whole book seems the literary equivalent of a post-bop jazz performance, with oblique happenings that compel attention because of the book’s antic energy and lyrical passages.
A meta-novel that stings and touches the reader.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798217047116
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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