An excellent coming-of-age novel with an indelible lead.
In Arnowitz-Taylor’s novel, a young man struggles to come to grips with his past traumas and current, lurking hazards.
When readers first meet Jamie Goldberg, he’s at a major crossroads in his young life. As an out gay man in 1980s Detroit, where AIDS is spreading quickly, Jamie’s health would be a concern even if he didn’t spend his time with dangerous people. But by 1982, in this third installment in Arnowitz-Taylor’s The Goldberg Variationsseries, Jamie is coming off of a stretch of near-Herculean promiscuity, a period of time in which he’s chalked up so many lovers that he struggles to remember them all, doubly so thanks to the foggy haze of the copious amounts of alcohol and drugs he’d consumed over the same stretch of years. Now a theater student at the fictional Detroit State University, he’s just been cast as Horatio in Hamlet. While he’s initially flattered and thrilled, he learns quickly that he may have gotten the role simply because the director, Dwight Griss, expects sexual favors in return. This would be humiliating enough, but Jamie is put in an especially difficult position because he’s just sworn off the reckless amounts of sex and drugs that have massively complicated his life up to this point. As the weight of his childhood trauma becomes nearly unbearable, we learn that Jamie’s notions of love and affection have been affected by the sexual assault he experienced when he was a teenager. Were it not for an impromptu birthday phone call to his cousin or the presence of his roommate, who’s studying psychology, Jamie might not be able to utter even this backhanded affirmation: “I will be okay as long as no one kills me.”
Arnowitz-Taylor’s latest isn’t a traditional page-turner, but it more than manages to be continually gripping because of a looming sense of dread. Readers will feel the current of violence surrounding the protagonist early in this novel, whether he’s trying to behave safely or not. Threats weave through Jamie’s world: a violent ex-con, down-and-out exes, and the “scumbag” director of Hamlet, whose mistreatment of Jamie is its own kind of social and physical violence. Indeed, it often seems there is nowhere for Jamie to turn outside of his own apartment: “The LGBTQ community was invisible. There was no gay anything except dark, loud, and seedy bars.” Via humorous, approachable prose, Arnowitz-Taylor tells an intriguing story. The novel’s best asset, however, is Jamie himself, who’s a flawed narrator in a compelling and human way, which is not to say “damaged,” though perhaps he is that, too. He comes off like a young man desperate to belong to a community he fears has already rejected him, and as such, some of his decisions, which might otherwise turn off readers, become far more sympathetic. As Jamie struggles to understand his place in the world and the way it perceives him, readers will no doubt see something of their own young selves in him.
An excellent coming-of-age novel with an indelible lead.Pub Date: May 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781734295757
Page Count: 350
Publisher: ArnoLand Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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