This dramatic tale of life in and outside the music industry hits all the right notes.
A California high school teacher reflects on his rock-star days and broods about reuniting his band.
In Levin’s follow-up to his novel Incomplete (2020), Brian Smith lives what some would consider an ordinary life. When he’s not teaching Advanced Placement English, he spends time with his wife and their Star Wars–loving 8-year-old daughter. But when his star pupil Veronica Jones interviews him, she dredges up memories of a past Brian abandoned two decades ago. He was once a member of the punk-rock group Call Field, a one-hit wonder from the early aughts. Back then, he and his band mates ecstatically signed a major-label deal. But it was Brian, bassist and chief songwriter, who practically lived at the studio to complete Call Field’s debut album. As with most fledgling music groups, both the label and fans tended to focus their attention on the frontman. In Call Field’s case, that was Steve Öken, a self-absorbed lead vocalist who tried exerting his dominance whenever he could, such as monopolizing the album cover. Not surprisingly, he butted heads with Brian—dissension that threatened the band even before its debut release. After Call Field’s ugly, animosity-laden split, Brian suffered physically and mentally. Yet when he dusts off his guitar 20 years later for his school’s talent show, he misses that exhilaration of playing music onstage. He has the chance to perform again for a benefit concert that Veronica is organizing. But she wants all five members of Call Field there. Brian and his band mates, who haven’t spoken in decades, will have to quell some bad feelings if they want to recapture that punk-rock magic they once had.
While Levin’s sequel centers on Call Field’s short-lived fame, the book is a starkly illuminating peek at the music industry. Brian, for example, toils for months on the album and plays multiple instruments on the tracks. But the record company, despite signing a punk-rock band, mixes the songs for a softer, more commercial sound, highlighting Steve’s vocals. It seems both the label and the lead singer are intent on seizing control of the tunes that Brian rightly considers his. Still, the story is not all scathing. Brian indisputably treasures music, as does the author, who drops in references to countless rock groups along with cameos by such six-stringed beauties as a Gibson SG and a Fender Stratocaster. In the tale’s family-oriented, present-day setting, Levin develops winsome, convincing relationships. Brian’s loving home life with his wife, Mel, and their daughter, Sam, has its ups and downs while good-naturedly brazen Veronica is his biggest fan and “something of a surrogate daughter.” The author, on occasion, shines too bright a spotlight on his metaphors. For example, Mel and a classroom of students separately analyze the oft-quoted lyrics to Call Field’s solitary hit, “Incomplete,” which unquestionably represents Brian’s past. But Levin more often hits the mark, as when Brian calms himself with a treadmill-inspired mantra that becomes the tale’s refrain: “Right foot. Left foot. Repeat.” Numerous uncredited artworks and photographs further elevate this enthralling story, with the standouts including Call Field’s startling album cover and flyers for the group’s appearances.
This dramatic tale of life in and outside the music industry hits all the right notes.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73775-690-3
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Not-So-Silent Librarian Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2021
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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