An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.
An unnamed narrator and his elderly interlocutor weave together forgotten queer histories in Torres’ second novel, following We the Animals (2011).
When the 20-something narrator wakes up from a blackout to find his kitchen flooded, he drives into the desert to visit Juan, an elderly friend who lives with “a badling of queer ducks” in a housing complex called the Palace. In exchange for a place to stay, the narrator agrees to carry on Juan’s life project, which involves a (real) 1941 research study called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. Though the research was begun in 1935 by Jan Gay, a lesbian anthropologist, the author named in the published study was psychiatrist George W. Henry, who used the text to pathologize homosexuality. Perusing Juan’s copy of the study, the narrator discovers largely blacked-out pages featuring highlighted fragments of text that Juan calls “little poems of illumination,” exercises in erasure that attempt to wrest the text from Dr. Henry and blow life back into the individual testimonies collected by Gay. Scans of the blacked-out pages of Sex Variants, in addition to related photographs and documents from Gay’s fictional archive, punctuate the novel’s short chapters, which capture Juan and the narrator’s conversations. Composed of stories both real and invented, collective and personal—Juan frequently asks the narrator to tell him about his sexual exploits—the novel's interlocutory structure recalls Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. As playful, inventive, and at times kaleidoscopic as the book may be, the dialogue between Juan and the narrator often comes across as forced, with some blocks of storytelling (including the entirety of Torres’ short story “Reverting to a Wild State,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2011) feeling wedged in. The novel shines and surprises, though, in sections where the characters interweave cultural and historical artifacts, as well as memory and literary references, to reconstruct and revise queer history. Here, the novel’s central question about where storytelling ends and history begins comes to the fore, albeit with no clear resolution. It's up to the reader, the narrator concludes, to decide where truth and fiction converge.
An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780374293574
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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