A disconnected look at a rarified world.
The artists in residence at an art institute have stories to tell in O’Brien’s novel.
At the Intona Institute of Art, students discover a painting by a Renaissance artist named Amadeo Verga. One of the students, Niev, is a scholar of Amadeo and recounts his story: Amadeo got his start as a glass artist but didn’t much care for the medium. He went to work for a nobleman who gave him the opportunity to paint his daughter, Lady Louise. Amadeo and Lady Louise had an affair, but Lady Louise married another noble and Amadeo went on to have a career as an artist. Niev shows the unnamed narrator, his childhood friend, around Intona and introduces him to Paul, a French painter. They also meet an architect named Jonas Monfleur, who tells them a story about the ancient civilization of Athzuria, which practiced something called “death by information”—criminals were tortured by being kept awake as someone read to them. The narrator goes home to his family, and the narrative’s point-of-view then shifts to some of the other characters: Niev’s girlfriend, a Chinese sculptor, may be deported; Intona’s privileged owner goes to a brothel and is talked into an AI-assisted sexual experiment that ultimately results in a lawsuit that may force him to sell the Institute; Paul meets his father’s fiancé. None of it really hangs together—the novel is bogged down in extraneous details, sidebars, and tangents rendering it unfocused and hard to follow. It’s not really clear how all of the stories Niev and the others at Intona tell connect, or if they are even supposed to, aside from Paul possibly being a descendant of the noble family that employed Amadeo. Some of the individual stories are engaging, but they feel disconnected and a little pretentious, and the prose is just this side of purple (“and now she was crying as I brought her into me, and embraced her, and she embraced me back, and I said, ‘I need you . . . there’s no one else I need, d’you hear me? I’ll die without you . . .’”).
A disconnected look at a rarified world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2024
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 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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