A slick and largely entertaining debut about the entertainment world.
An aging actor, his best friend, and some others navigate fame and frustration in Hollywood.
Verity’s current project is the fifth installment of a commercial blockbuster movie franchise in which he plays “green old void Bly.” His closest confidant is 40-something scriptwriter and -editor Helen; the two met in a diner days after Verity moved to Los Angeles and have spent decades intertwined, having sex sometimes and often living together. Verity is a heavy drinker, vain, obsessed with beauty, and beautiful himself—“with that face he would have gotten famous if he couldn’t act his way out of a shoe,” as Helen puts it. Verity gets the idea to lottery off his salary and his percentage of box office sales from his newest movie to someone who’s bought a ticket. The decision comes on the heels of an eyebrow-raising GQ profile, and the winner is announced on the TikTok account of “hitherto unknown” actress Nina Walker, who’s admittedly too young for Verity but with whom he shacks up anyway. These actions scandalize his professional colleagues but don’t surprise Helen. The first-person narration alternates between Verity and Helen until readers are introduced to Phoebe, a young aspiring scriptwriter looking for ways to find support for her fledgling career. The full extent of Phoebe’s connection to Helen and Verity isn’t revealed until quite late in the book. The meandering prose and ruminations on fame and the industry certainly have touches of Joan Didion, who’s explicitly mentioned twice, while Verity’s anachronisms (he refers to cellphones as “rectangles”) and dismal attitude frequently feel Holden Caulfield–esque. An example: Thinking about the relationship between older men and beautiful women, he remarks, “I felt pretty depressed. I really did. I was all over the place.” Though readers may find the winding plot a little thin, Rothery’s prose is frequently a knockout, and her sense of literary style is enjoyable.
A slick and largely entertaining debut about the entertainment world.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780063443327
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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