An evocative, effective dive into dark if too familiar waters.
A twisted coming-of age-story concerning two young outsiders unable and unwilling to fit into the narrow confines of their small Irish village or, later, into more sophisticated Dublin.
Geary uses gorgeous prose, full of Irish lilt and hard-edged slang, to describe bleak childhoods as harsh as any found in a Dickens novel. When 12-year-old Juno first meets Legs, their crises at home and school veer close to clichés about the downtrodden: There are Juno’s useless alcoholic father and worn-down seamstress mother whose clients seldom pay; Legs’ absent father and rigid mother ready to send him to a “special” school to cure him of his sinful artistic effeminacy; hostile classmates who shun Juno for her poverty and Legs for his otherness; the priest in charge of the school who beats and humiliates them. Juno and Legs establish their bond after she stands up for him against playground bullies and he distracts the priest with misbehavior to protect her from mortification in the classroom. Narrator Juno takes up most of the emotional space here, showing in detail her troubled mix of good intentions, self-destructive combativeness, and constant sense of guilt. Juno’s longings tend to erupt in spur-of-the-moment acts—breaking a neighbor’s flowerpot, punching someone’s nose, taking her first drink—that make her life worse. Seen only through Juno’s eyes, Legs is harder to read because Juno knows only what he tells her. Then an explosion of Legs' rage against the priest leads to years of forced separation from Juno. Even when they reconnect in Dublin, where Legs, now a member of the artistic demimonde, takes in Juno, who is on the skids, he remains enigmatic until a rush of last-minute revelations. Inescapable poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, the unnamed “plague” frightening gay Dubliners in the 1980s—much of the novel is almost unbearably grim, making the occasional glimpses of real kindness Juno and Legs experience that much more poignant.
An evocative, effective dive into dark if too familiar waters.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781646221134
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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