An intriguing but meandering volcano tale with little to balance its bleak worldview.
In this debut literary novel, a young family begins a wildfire-inspired road trip across the Beehive State.
Seasonal wildfires continue to decimate the Western United States, and the town of Logan, Utah, is in danger of being consumed. Young married couple Lee and Becca Smith are about to hit the road—not a moment too soon. Lee has his mind on the Yellowstone supervolcano, which is apparently getting quite fidgety, while Becca doesn’t know if she can stand any more time alone with their infant daughter, Analise: “The two of them walked outside and Lee locked the front door of their tiny duplex behind them, Becca sarcastically thinking that the imminent destruction of the planet via a volcano or earthquake or wildfire seemed more pleasant to her than marriage or motherhood.” As they make their unhurried way across the state of Utah to a family wedding at Zion National Park, the couple fret about the parenthood that forced them into marriage and the many untaken roads in their separate lives. Along the way, they encounter a gaggle of friends, relatives, and strangers, including both Lee’s and Becca’s mothers and an unhinged veteran–turned–domestic terrorist. Rogers’ plainspoken prose deftly depicts ordinary life interspersed with images of personal and societal doom. Lee’s dreams feature “images of the bubbling caldera under Yellowstone,” its yellow and red lava “hissing, creeping, slowly making its way to the surface of the earth. The wolves and mountain lions and grizzly bears all fleeing from the impending disaster in the area in their mammalian omniscience.” The story is a bit too long and a bit too slow, with the human drama taking a back seat to the ominous climatic and volcanic imagery and literally apocalyptic conclusion. (Readers learn, in the introduction, that this volume is meant to be read as a manuscript found beneath the rubble of the former state of Utah.) While the title, premise, and Tolkien-inspired state map at the book’s beginning all suggest a work of levity—or at least satire—the actual novel is a largely dreary tale of people enacting the Freudian death drive. As pressures build in their own lives, so too do the pressures beneath the ailing Earth’s crust.
An intriguing but meandering volcano tale with little to balance its bleak worldview.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63752-975-1
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2021
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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