An overlong but powerful tale of one young man’s sexual awakening.
A sequel focuses on a gay student coming into his own in early 1980s Detroit.
After an adolescence filled with fear and self-loathing, Jamie Goldberg has finally decided to come out of the closet. The college student chooses to do so the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1980 in the kitchen of his parents’ home in Northwest Detroit. “There,” narrates Jamie ruefully, “homosexuality scored another decisive yet Pyrrhic victory.” Despite his mother’s lifetime of involvement in progressive politics, she reacts with anger and disgust. His father asks him to leave, telling him, “Don’t come back until you’re cured.” Now that his parents are no longer paying for school, Jamie switches to his preferred major, theater, and throws himself into the work. He begins to experiment with his newfound freedom, but he still has concerns with the way others perceive him as well as learning hard lessons about love and sex. Jamie begins to develop a reputation for promiscuity after an incident involving his crush, Casper Tyres, and he starts to explore—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—the world of cruising. In certain bathrooms and parks, with acquaintances and strangers, Jamie finally becomes intimate with the peculiar and often frightening world of male sexuality. It’s made all the more difficult by the fact that he still has not yet reckoned with the act that initiated his sexual life: the rape he suffered as a young boy. As Jamie’s sex life quickly escalates to new heights, he realizes that he hasn’t found himself by coming out of the closet. In order to realize who the real Jamie Goldberg is, he still has a lot of work to do.
Taylor’s prose is smooth and often striking, creating memorable images that will stick in readers’ minds as much as they do in that of the impressionable Jamie: “We got in this old boat-like white Cadillac and drove down Woodward. Detroit, that late at night, resembled a demilitarized zone after curfew. Stores with thick metal bars; offices with small if any windows, protected by iron rails; and the occasional empty burned-out lot left exactly as it was after the 1968 riots.” The author skillfully portrays Jamie’s claustrophobic sense of himself in the world, beset on one side by the homophobia that constantly threatens his well-being and on the other by the lusts of men who do not have his best interests at heart. Between this rock and a hard place, Jamie festers in a stew of confusion and self-disgust. The book has a narrower time frame than the previous volume in the series, covering only a six-month period from 1980 to ’81. While the condensed period helps make the tale more palatable, there is still just too much of it. At over 400 pages,the book is bloated by superfluous scenes and redundant episodes, feeling more diaristic than novelistic on occasion. Taylor succeeds in capturing a time and place in Jamie’s life, but the story would likely have had a greater impact if the author had managed to show less of it.
An overlong but powerful tale of one young man’s sexual awakening.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73429-570-2
Page Count: 414
Publisher: ArnoLand Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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