An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.
In Land’s novel, a young man tries to access his spirituality with guidance from a teacher.
Uncanny events punctuate Gabe’s life: At 6 years old, his hand passes through a toy train he holds; a couple of years later, he floats in a vast abyss after his bedroom walls “[peel] back like layers of paper.” As the years pass, otherworldly events keep happening. Touching a heavy wooden bedframe with one finger, Gabe watches the bed easily slide over, and he walks away unscathed from the collision of his Mustang Mach II with an oncoming pickup truck. In a California coffee shop, searching for meaning in his life, Gabe encounters an older man, Elias, and feels “a hum of presence.” In subsequent meetings held in outdoor locations, such as parks, forest clearings, riverbanks, and meadows, Elias guides Gabe to an understanding of life as a game that we play many times. They consider figures who believed in themselves and overcame doubt, including Jesus, the Buddha, Mother Teresa, Wim Hof, and Elon Musk. After all the dialogues, the hardest work begins: Gabe has learned the rules, but must relinquish the fear and resistance that keep him from achieving full spiritual mastery. Gabe and Elias are the only two characters in this book, and little happens in each chapter aside from conversations. The characters don’t exactly sound like real people as they constantly grapple with elevated concepts such as the soul, god, and karma, but this seems intentional. Rather than inhabiting personalities, they embody roles: pupil and mentor. More conflict might have been beneficial to the story, however, as Gabe is exceptional from the start. Land’s vivid descriptions of nature add engaging flourishes, helping to ground readers between the volleys of intense dialogue; a park where Gabe meets Elias is a “mosaic of tall trees, swatches of green grass, and gravel paths that crunched underfoot.” The text may lead readers to other thinkers (a resource guide is available at the end) while also offering inspiration of its own; the author repeats the new ideas and rules Gabe learns in easy-to-understand, bullet-pointed lists.
An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.Pub Date: June 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798765262016
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Balboa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
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
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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