A set of colorfully written short works that seem to work best in isolation.
Tuft, a retired Presbyterian minister and mental health counselor, blends fantasy and reality in an eclectic short story collection.
These tales introduce readers to a world of fantasy and biography through accounts of a wide range of characters, auspiciously intended for an audience of “human beans and other perishables.” The book features dozens of brief stories, each about a different person or situation, but all bound together through common themes of religion, health, or medicine; some share a common Pennsylvanian setting. Each ends with the phrase, “Words are magic, and writers are wizards”—an intriguing repetition that leads readers to contemplate that the stories are somehow interconnected; the phrase also ends the preface, which offers a bit more context on the sentences that follow: “I write because I have to, I cannot not write. Stories are in my blood.” The book’s greatest strength is Tuft’s rich, memorable imagery, as in “Sea of Lonely”: “The young boy clutches his father’s hand as he dodges the wheelchairs filled with wispy-haired gnomes who make feeble gestures as they reach to touch him.” The author’s vivid language allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the worlds he constructs or retells from his past, as in “Ginny,” a story about a 90-year-old-woman with dementia at an independent living facility where the author also resides. The weakest aspect of the collection is how it jumps around interrelated themes; at times, readers may find the stories to be a bit hard to follow and may puzzle over how a particular tale relates to others, such as “Johnny Smoke” and “The Black Mile,” which each feature very different experiences of a veteran of the Vietnam War, or “The Green Dot,” “Knights of Fantasia,” and “Plant a Sticker,” each of which centers on an image of someone reverently placing an object or mark on another person’s forehead. As such, readers may get the most out of these stories by approaching each as a unit rather than collectively, which makes their individual charms more apparent.
A set of colorfully written short works that seem to work best in isolation.Pub Date: July 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781666779127
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Resource Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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