An engaging dark comedy about the dangers of family ties.
A novel focuses on a close-knit, dysfunctional clan of aspiring bank robbers.
In New Jersey, the stock market crash of 1987 signals a rude awakening for Barry Gimmelman. With his job, savings, and house gone, he piles his family into the only thing to escape repossession, the RV lovingly nicknamed Gas-Guzzler, and heads for Florida to stay with his mother-in-law. Narrated by Barry’s 12-year-old son, Aaron, Goldberg’s book is part road novel, part crime story, and part family saga. Aaron and Barry are like two tropical hurricanes feeding off each other’s destructive potential. When Aaron intuits the depth of his family’s financial need, he empties the cash register at a gas station, which gives Barry the idea to enlist the members of his family as accomplices in larger robberies. They include his devoted wife, Judith, and Aaron’s two sisters: boy-crazy Steph and mildly psychopathic Jenny. Driven by love, despair, the desire for adventure, or simply Barry’s charisma, the Gimmelmans soon transform from an average American family into Bonnie and Clyde with kids. Meanwhile, to escape his conscience, Aaron begins dipping into his father’s vial of cocaine stashed in the glove compartment. Goldberg’s writing sparkles with humor and wit, fitting moments of intimacy into otherwise dark scenes. For the family’s first heist, the parents use Judith’s bra, ripped in half, as masks. When Barry tries to sell his wife on a life of crime, he argues, “I’ll tell you why it will work. We are the most mild-mannered-looking squares on the planet. The kids, the RV, my hair, your fanny pack,” to which Judith responds: “You know a purse hurts my back.” As the family’s appetites spiral out of control, the robberies become more and more elaborate, with the jackpot rising exponentially. And even as the excitement brings the deliciously dysfunctional family together, Barry’s unchecked ambition soon develops ominous undertones in this engrossing story. What are the Gimmelmans willing to sacrifice in their quest for financial stability and what will it take to stop them?
An engaging dark comedy about the dangers of family ties.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781685124212
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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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