An enjoyable romp brought to life by its lovable, off-kilter protagonist.
An enterprising 18-year-old oddball seeks to break into the 1980s tattoo scene.
After graduating from high school, Gina Mulley can easily identify the jobs she doesn’t want: bartender; typist; any position that removes her from Blue Claw, the Long Island town where she grew up. She’s reluctant to part from her older brother, Dominic; amid a childhood punctuated by her mother’s breakdowns and her own inability to connect with peers, he’s the only source of stability she’s ever known. Gina spends her time at Dominic’s tattoo shop doing odd jobs, doodling strange, alien fish, and avoiding job applications—till she realizes a tattooist's career perfectly suits what Dominic dubs her innate “artistic flair.” After much persuasion, Gina convinces her brother to take her on as an apprentice, with the knowledge that making it as a tattooist in an almost exclusively male-dominated industry will be nearly impossible. As Gina tattoos sackfuls of oranges and sketches bizarre tattoo “flash”—crosses made of vegetables; hybrid animals—she meets the enigmatic and spellbinding Anna, the apparent protégé of a local clairvoyant; the two develop a long-distance correspondence that eventually becomes a close-knit friendship, and perhaps something more. As Gina fights tooth and nail to be taken seriously as an artist, she must navigate an increasingly fraught relationship with her brother, who resists seeing her as an independent adult—all while helping the struggling tattoo shop survive. From the start, the novel is immersive and wholly alive. Gervais painstakingly renders the fine-grained particularities of the 1980s body-art scene and locates its deeper emotional core: Tattoos are not just ink, but “something invisible made visible. A truth [that] you were finally willing to have out in the open, to be seen.” Gina is a touchingly complex, flawed character; her journey from childhood misfit to adult is gratifying to behold. Though some of the narrative threads feel underbaked—Gina’s relationship to her mother isn’t believably resolved; Dominic’s relationship struggles lie somewhat apart from the story’s center—Gervais’ characters are original and a pleasure to read; their narrative energy will easily carry readers through to the final page.
An enjoyable romp brought to life by its lovable, off-kilter protagonist.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59-329879-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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