A short and insightful novel of an aging hippie generation.
A hapless informant-turned-professor dives into the past in search of a woman he once loved in Canter’s comic novel.
Lincoln “Linc” Cox was a freshman in college when he met high school senior Samantha Victor at a debutante cotillion. Samantha was one of the debs—the daughter of a wealthy banker and a prominent socialite, and hardly the sort of girl he’d expect to get caught up in the radical politics of the late 1960s. Their relationship was brief and ended before Samantha joined the militant Weather Underground, though Linc covered the 1969 Days of Rage demonstration in Chicago as a reporter and witnessed Samantha’s participation in it from a distance. Forty years later, Linc is a divorced college professor writing a book on the Weathermen and hunting down old members, partially in the hope of reconnecting with Samantha. One major complication: Linc became a state informant on the Weathermen not long after the Days of Rage—and has remained one for the past four decades. Only recently did he learn, during an attempt to interview an ex-member of the group, that he has a reputation for being a rat. As he attempts to locate Samantha, fallout from events from the past—including the famous Greenwich Village townhouse explosion—reemerge to threaten to upend his present. Canter’s prose is smooth and often funny, presenting Linc’s self-deprecating account of his hapless adventures in a nebulous world of espionage and terrorism. Here, for instance, he describes his time confined in an American safe house in England in the 1970s: “They trained spies, and from time to time I was used as a guinea pig by female spies in training. Their job was to make me think they liked me….They didn’t tell me that.” Although the premise seems a bit contrived at first, the plot grows increasingly intricate and surprising, and readers will quickly find themselves caught up in the intrigue of it all. Canter hews fairly closely to historical fact, up to a point, and manages to turn this peculiar piece of 1960s lore into a witty, immersive read.
A short and insightful novel of an aging hippie generation.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73636-271-6
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Debutante Press LLC
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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