An outstanding collection of tales with delightfully diverse and memorable characters.
A debut volume of short stories features individuals in realistic, if uncompromising, situations.
The 11 tales in Nagler’s collection encompass the kinds of relatable themes readers will recognize, like survival, longing, connection, grief, and the bonds of family, with each playing out across America’s wind-swept dairy landscape and beyond. The tender, intimate opener, “Ponty Bayswater,” chronicles the beautifully fluid love life of a war veteran and insurance salesman who learned about the mechanics of sexuality at age 12 from his “loopy Aunt Violet.” Readers will get a sense of the author’s uncanny knack for intriguing characterization from her description of Violet, who spoke with a “nicotine bark” and sported “pink cat-eye glasses with fake diamonds, had a head of tightly curled gray and black hair and wore bright red lipstick, even at home.” The evolution of families forms the framework for other stories, like “Asa at the Foundry,” in which passion and pain bloom amid “stupid summer heat.” In “Maximus,” a Mexican son transcends cultures when he immigrates to America by car trunk. The pain of parental loss is brilliantly captured in “Fishing,” as a daughter’s grief is only soothed by her desire to remember her father by fishing in the Wolf River. The most moving stories encapsulate the epiphany felt by characters who discover love in unexpected places. The callousness of a perfume journalist’s mean boyfriend in “Leaving Lefty” forces him to reevaluate how he recovers from broken relationships to better appreciate “who is there to love me and let me love them back.” Among the collection’s shorter, more potent tales is the unforgettably gritty, nine-page yarn “Claire Rose,” which portrays how a traumatized wife processes a horrific ordeal involving her child. Nagler sketches in the difficult details of healing and the grief and anger that eventually yield to places where “pink flowers come up year after year without being asked, in a place they’re not supposed to grow.” Whether the stories concern age, death, cruelty, or love, the author creates bold, authentic characters with no choice but to adapt to circumstances they’d never expected in order to proceed with strength and grace. Orbited by players who are bound by mortality, ancestry, pathos, and perseverance, this emotionally satisfying volume becomes a sublime, interconnected wonder.
An outstanding collection of tales with delightfully diverse and memorable characters.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Coyote Point Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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