Despite a flurry of stylistic flourishes, a cleareyed character study emerges, brimming with warmth and sympathy.
In Evans’ most recent novel, Damien Wood and his expat friends discover that humanity is a fragile thing, especially when held up against the vicissitudes of a generally uncaring universe.
Told largely, though not exclusively, as a collection of second-person journal entries and blog posts, the novel follows Damien’s life through the first few years of the 2000s, with occasional flashbacks to his teen years and sidesteps into other, tangentially related issues. Despite several achievements in his life, including success as a writer and spoken-word artist, Damien is progressively isolated from his loved ones and from himself, and he searches for a connection via frequent travel, alcohol and an increasingly agitated series of relationships with women. By the time Damien ends up in Cambodia, drinking nearly nonstop, he’s been driven to distraction by his latest female companion and seemingly endless visa issues. Events line up for a darker turn. As befitting the rapid, cross-platform nature of Damien’s work and lifestyle, Evans tells the story in a rapid mishmash of stylistic devices, including poetry, fake technical instructions and shifting typographic standards, while keeping the story moving breathlessly forward. The effect becomes wearing in the middle of the narrative, but Damien remains an engaging, witty character from beginning to end. The more grandiose effects are grounded by the reader’s natural sympathy for Damien, the hapless protagonist. Evans also effectively uses cultural indicators to evoke the time period without dating the material, even though references to MySpace come perilously close to bucking this trend. Readers who approach the narrative with suspicion about the central metaphor—which is understandable, given the nearly clichéd nature of the “technology dehumanizes us” trope—will likely appreciate the dexterous subtlety Evans employs to underline the theme through actions rather than baldly declaring it in dialogue or exposition.
Despite a flurry of stylistic flourishes, a cleareyed character study emerges, brimming with warmth and sympathy.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938545016
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pangea Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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