A playful, postmodern exploration of the allure and limitations of utopia.
A group of seekers attempts to resurrect an old utopian community in Lockridge’s comic novel, the fourth in a series.
In the year 2050, an unnamed researcher presents his findings regarding the various utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana. The researcher is an “adjunct assistant clinical instructor of post-millennial studies, Wabash College,” who happens to have been born at the exact moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He is also the grandson of Sam Coverdale, founder of the most recent of these failed communities, a 1999 venture meant to achieve a convergence of all knowledge called the New Harmony Institute. Though many specialists were involved, the seven key players—according to our narrator—include two couples—the scientific Schillers and the artistic Gordons—plus the Gordons’ daughter, Allegra, Coverdale himself, and Coverdale’s “psychologically damaged” son, Hartley. In their attempts to avoid the mistakes of the previous utopian communities on the site—which were organized by a German zealot and a Welsh industrialist—the hapless Coverdalians uncover an encoded scroll at the bottom of a labyrinth, host a mammoth pageant, and discover a plague that might very well wipe out all of the world’s trees. Mostly, though, these aging intellectuals’ combustive interactions force them to consider the timeless inscrutability of marriage, parenthood, suicide, and life on Earth. The author’s madcap prose is as breathless as it is colorful. One chapter begins: “While others met to lick wounds at Le Pool Hall, Allegra sped in the Pathfinder to the shrine of the Dalai Lama’s brother, a few miles south of Bloomington. She was bewildered to find the shrine surrounded by thirty-three men in red fezzes peddling mini-cycles in intricate circular patterns.” The novel contains several layers of storytelling, and its mysteries take a leisurely approach to revealing themselves. There’s more play than plot, perhaps, but nearly every page is ripe with humor, literary references, and sincere questions about how we should be living.
A playful, postmodern exploration of the allure and limitations of utopia.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781771806169
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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