A dark, literary family saga played out across the open road with characters readers won’t want to leave behind.
Epps chronicles the damage wrought by a broken family in this third installment of his American Wrath trilogy.
Charles “Chuck” Hardy is struggling: his 4-year-old son Brian has begun to display some tendencies that indicate he may have attention deficit disorder and is perhaps autistic, too; simultaneously, Chuck finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage to Samantha (“Sam”), a former airline stewardess he married after impregnating her during a one-night stand in the mid-1990s. As she carries on a series of affairs, Chuck loses himself in the twin distractions of working and drinking. Brian, a loner and outcast from the start, has a few nerdy friends when he reaches high school, but even among those few companions, he is too shy to fully describe an unsettling situation that bedevils him: For a while now, he’s been followed around by a woman in a mysterious black Mercedes. Brian steadies himself enough to earn a partial scholarship to a state school a few hours from home. There, he again struggles socially, spending most of his freshman year quietly stalking a girl named Brandy. Though she disappears for a time, she reappears seemingly from nowhere in his senior year, and the two begin dating. Readers soon learn she’s after Brian for the protection she thinks he might offer on her post-collegiate cross-country journey to drum up Instagram followers and propel her to influencer stardom. While Brian’s parents sink further into their separate miseries, the relationship between Brian and Brandy deteriorates frighteningly, and readers discover that Brian was a victim of childhood sexual abuse—a pattern he reinforces by sexually assaulting Brandy during their trip.
Smoothly written and alluringly-paced, Epps’ third novel succeeds largely on the basis of its character development. Though Chuck is something of a flaccid, passive actor in his own life, readers grow sympathetic toward him once they meet his own useless father; sympathy for Brian is engendered in much the same way. The women in this novel are, perhaps, a bit less fully realized, as Brandy veers into a vanity-obsessed stereotype and Sam feels, at times, like a one-dimensional serial adulterer. Nevertheless, Brian and Chuck will keep readers engaged, warts and all. The author’s flair for description—“Down the highway, lit like a stroke of genius, a white stab of the sun bleached [Brian and Brandy’s] sightline”—peppers the work with memorable lines and genuine originality. Readers in search of a fast-paced page-turner may not find enough here to keep them flying through, but fans of a more literary approach will appreciate Epps’ well drawn characters. While “road” novels are an American tradition and therefore a somewhat crowded field, this work manages to distinguish itself by marrying that tradition to the modern experience of social media and the ways in which Gen Z desperately seeks to monetize their looks and a highly-curated, overly-romanticized, fantasy-driven lifestyle for recognition and remuneration. Finding oneself invested in characters with such glaring flaws is sure to be a satisfying reading experience for those who take the plunge.
A dark, literary family saga played out across the open road with characters readers won’t want to leave behind.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 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
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
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