A claustrophobic novel about destructive friends and destructive urges.
In Harper’s debut literary novel, a writer’s trip to an artsy town becomes an interminable nightmare.
For the past week, aspiring writer Morris Hines has been staying (and drinking) at the Manderlay Colony, an artists residence where he’d hoped to make some headway on his fantasy novel. Now, on his last night in town before returning home to Washington, D.C., and his fiancee, Yasmin, Morris has wandered into the Public House, a dive bar with no signage, patronized mostly by locals. There, he runs into Henry, an old friend from college whom Morris has not seen for a decade. Morris’ history with Henry is complex, and he isn’t thrilled to run into him—especially given how run-down Henry looks, with a puffy face and burns on his hands. A townwide electrical blackout provides Morris an opportunity to escape the bar before the past can be dredged up, but he misses his flight the next morning and can’t get a new one for two more days. This unintended extension of his off-season stay in the small town promises additional drunken nights and additional run-ins with Henry and his hard-living crowd. Will Morris be able to put his old ghosts to rest, or will a series of bad decisions leave him as broken as Henry? The author’s prose is breezy and straightforward, as when the bisexual Morris describes his days rooming with the gay Henry: “Sometimes they had sex, but most times, they didn’t. It became a little transaction between them, a ‘help me out’ moment when there was an itch that needed scratching. They rarely discussed it except to instruct in what they liked. After all, there was no point in stretching it out longer than it needed to be.” The mood is all over the place—sometimes menacing, sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic—and the plot is not entirely convincing. Even so, Harper manages to capture the dislocation of a certain type of drinking binge, wherein the present starts to resemble a fun-house mirror of the past.
A claustrophobic novel about destructive friends and destructive urges.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781590215852
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 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
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
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