A provocative vision of a world desperately in search of basic human compassion.
In an arcane future legal system, a garbage collector is called to serve as a jury of one.
With his enigmatic approach, it’s hard to say that a surrealist like Ball is back on brand. That said, longtime readers will find this Black Mirror–flavored episode closer to The Divers’ Game (2019) or A Cure for Suicide (2015) than to his more conventional deliveries. Our point of entry into this peculiar world is Abel Cotter, a 40-something sanitation worker—he prefers “heavy-machine operator”—and a complete cipher despite a tragic backstory. Abel has been selected to serve on the jury of a futuristic justice system meant to focus on forward progress rather than corporal punishment, the ultimate goal being to eliminate “unfit” individuals from society. Its execution depends on the titular device, a cryptic machine that enables the juror to experience the accused’s life firsthand, down to feelings, motivations, and regrets. Unlike a typical jury, this one is narrowed by process of elimination, a process starkly explained to Abel with warnings like, “You may be a coward. This has been taken into account,” and “This is not your regular life. Have a care.” Our glimpses of Abel’s experience evoke the TV series The Prisoner and the invasive justice parlayed in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. Just when you think you’ve figured things out, Ball changes tempo midstream when we meet the accused. In the second half of the book, the unnamed defendant narrates his surreal, taboo relationship with his sister, set against the backdrop of an abusive household and culminating in her death. Ball puts down broad brush strokes here about bureaucratic justice versus human frailty, but the devil is in the details; his disorienting style and the unsettling atmosphere deliver a uniquely uncomfortable experience.
A provocative vision of a world desperately in search of basic human compassion.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781646221400
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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