An unusual and entertaining fish-out-of-water tale.
In Sullivan’s novel, a British book lover travels to Los Angeles to retrieve a rare volume for his employer and unwittingly becomes embroiled in celebrity scandal.
Adam Verlain works at a small English university as a book cataloguer; his supervisor, Vincent, is constantly frustrated by Adam’s extreme attention to seemingly irrelevant details. Given his annoyance, it’s especially surprising when Vincent asks Adam to travel to the U.S. on behalf of the university to retrieve a special 1865 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The deeply introverted Adam begs his employer to send someone else, but Vincent insists, promising Adam he’ll be met at the airport with the book. After a disastrous plane ride (“the brat vomited on his back”), Adam finds no book waiting at the airport—only a driver, who takes him to meet the book’s owner, none other than famous actress Casey Blanchard. For reasons he can’t understand, Adam is compelled to go with Casey to her movie premiere that night. Despite his protestations, he’s pulled into Casey’s whirlwind life, outfitted by her stylist and whisked off to a high-profile event. Before he knows what’s happened, he finds himself at the center of a celebrity love triangle, a target of the paparazzi, the reluctant friend of a literal black jungle cat, and the unwitting pawn in a plot he could never have imagined. Full of slapstick moments—Adam is attacked by photographers and accidentally consumes drugs—the book provides a comic portrait of life in Los Angeles. Though the tale gets off to a slow start with lengthy, tedious descriptions of books and their provenances, once Adam is ensconced in the LA drama the narrative hits its stride, with characters romping through humorous debacles at a brisk pace. Readers may be tripped up by the odd dialect the author attributes to the Californians (the dropped g’s and diminutives are more suggestive of the American South), but the well-drawn characters’ quirks are endearing.
An unusual and entertaining fish-out-of-water tale.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 9781734418187
Page Count: 246
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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