Gathers layers like a snowball racing downhill before striking us in the heart with blunt, icy force.
McCorkle returns to Southern Pines, North Carolina, to explore themes of fate, mortality, and the human need for coping rituals.
Four characters take turns narrating what at first appears to be a rather aimless accretion of vignettes. On closer reading, however, the ingenious structure of this novel reveals itself. The present action begins on June 12, 2018, as Frank, a retired professor in his 80s, leaves what appears to be a suicide note and heads out in search of artifacts from his childhood. A single mother named Shelley is struggling to retain her court reporting job after the trial judge discovers that she's doing more than simply transcribing the trial of a prominent doctor accused of killing his young mistress. Shelley’s younger son, Harvey, self-conscious about his repaired cleft palate, is worrying his mother and teachers with his fixation on serial killers and ghosts. Frank and his wife, Lil, recently moved to North Carolina from Newton, Massachusetts. Their reminiscences, conveyed by his interior reflection and her notebook entries, reveal the tragic coincidence that united them: In the early 1940s, each lost a parent to a disaster when Lil’s mother died in a Boston nightclub fire and Frank’s father perished in a North Carolina train wreck while returning from Florida with his wife. Frank’s formerly idyllic childhood in Newton was doubly curtailed by his father’s death and his mother’s refusal to leave North Carolina. She married Preston, the tobacco farmer who rescued her from the wreck. The remainder of Frank’s childhood was spent in Preston’s house, near the tracks—the house that Shelley now occupies. Lil’s notes, spanning decades, reveal Frank’s infidelity and their eventual reconciliation. Death permeates this starkly honest tale, unleavened by McCorkle’s usual humor. Frank is still obsessed with the funerary customs and afterlife mythology he once studied. Harvey is transfixed by morbidity. Shelley harbors conflicting sentiments about justifiable homicide. Lil rails against Frank’s growing fatalism.
Gathers layers like a snowball racing downhill before striking us in the heart with blunt, icy force.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-972-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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