Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment.
This intensely wrought tone poem stalks an enslaved girl’s tortuous passage through the human-made and natural perils of the antebellum Deep South.
Ward follows her award-winning Bois Sauvage trilogy (Where the Line Bleeds, 2008; Salvage the Bones, 2011; Sing, Unburied, Sing, 2017) by moving away from her native Mississippi and back in time to the rice fields of pre–Civil War North Carolina, where Annis, a bright young Black woman who has learned from her mother, enslaved like her, that the white man who owns her is also her father and his daughters (on whose school lessons about Aristotle and the social habits of bees she eavesdrops) are her sisters. Annis’ mother enhances the younger woman’s education with lessons in self-defense and survival tactics she carried with her from Africa, where, as she informs her daughter, her mother was a warrior queen. Annis will need all this inherited cunning and resilience after her “sire” sells her mother. Away from her chores, Annis finds solace from her lover, Safi, the bees carrying out their own chores in the nearby forest, and words from a poem about an “ancient Italian” descending into hell as intoned by her sisters’ tutor. After Safi flees the plantation, Annis and other slave women are herded like cattle and sent off on a long, grueling march further south. Along the way, Annis has her first encounter with a dynamic woman spirit bearing the name Mama Aza, an imperious and enigmatic guardian angel guiding and protecting Annis from the more malevolent spirits that endanger the women’s lives en route to the slave markets of New Orleans, which Annis likens to the “grief-racked city” of Dante’s poem. There’s little that Ward’s narrative contributes to the literature of American slavery in its basic historic details. But what gives this volume its stature and heft among other recent novels are the power, precision, and visionary flow of Ward’s writing, the way she makes the unimaginable horror, soul-crushing drudgery, and haphazard cruelties of the distant past vivid to her readers. Every time you think this novel is taking you places you’ve been before, Ward startles you with an image, a metaphor, a rhetorical surge that makes both Annis and her travails worth your attention. And admiration.
Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781982104498
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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