A luminously written coming-of-age story abounding in compassion and wisdom.
In Zervanos’ novel, a young man dreams of being an actor but finds disappointment on the road to success.
Johnny Demos, a bartender at his grandfather’s restaurant who’s nearing the end of high school, dreads the prospect of spending his life shucking oysters and waiting tables. Seeking escape, he embarks on a potentially ill-advised career in acting, spurred on by a brief relationship with the “painfully lovely” Sierra McCloud. Shortly after the death of his grandfather, Johnny learns that a cousin, Mitch Mitchell—a self-described “producer of independent films”—has written the script for a movie that will feature an appearance by screen legend Dante Saludo, a John Goodman–like figure whose career has seen better days. Johnny eagerly follows Mitch to New York under the illusion that he’s headed for a career in film. Naïvely, he misses all the signs that Mitch is a disreputable character, and the resulting collapse of his dreams is—like Pip’s disillusionment in Great Expectations—both devastating and darkly funny. Also like Pip, he ultimately learns the folly of rejecting family in pursuit of grandiose pursuits, and his desperation to succeed makes him instantly endearing. Zervanos is an excellent prose stylist with a keen eye for the subtleties that inform human interaction—small moments like an uncle repeating the only word he knows from Shakespeare, or an elderly woman dabbing a loved one’s face with a washcloth. He excels at mining poetry from the mundane: “His forehead looked like clay that hadn’t made it to the kiln and was beginning to crack.” The author evokes youthful solipsism with poignancy: “The only thing I knew for certain was that I was completely and utterly alone in the universe.” The oddball characters who orbit Johnny are rendered with a humorous yet sympathetic eye, and, like the best bildungsromans, the book leaves readers with a warm sense of hope.
A luminously written coming-of-age story abounding in compassion and wisdom.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9783988321787
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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