A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.
A young gay man confronts his town and its history in the fourth novel in the Croy Cycle series.
It’s 1970, the summer before basketball star Jake Jacobs’ senior year, and he’s just passed on a chance to spend it in Paris, France, with his thespian mother. Instead, he wants to remain in Croy, Oklahoma, where he moved two years ago. Things aren’t quite what they used to be—his friend and old crush, Randy Edom, hasn’t been around since he graduated and inherited a large sum of money—but Jake’s best pal, Joanie Tibbits, is still around. He also has a new flame, Beau Hamilton, a sensitive musician who enjoys secretly wearing women’s undergarments. Together with other friends, Jake and Beau form a rock band called the Quirks—a nod to its members’ idiosyncrasies—and find cathartic musical expression for their angst. Joanie, the editor of the school paper, launches an investigation into a controversial sculpture that once adorned the local library. Why was it removed, and what became of it? Randy returns home to take care of his ailing mother, Virginia, and come to terms with some family history that he’s ignored for too long. The era’s cultural upheavals also begin to manifest in the town’s social life: Young men are coming home from Vietnam with unspoken horror stories locked up in their injured bodies, and many in Croy are unwilling to accept loves and lifestyles that don’t conform to conservative Christian morality. Jake has just one year left in town, but is that enough time to put its ghosts to rest?
Over the course of this novel, Ceci effectively infuses the prose with the well-developed personalities of its characters, as when Randy visits his sick mother: “Virginia smiled like she’d just awoken from a good dream. She waved one of her IV lines. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ ‘Does it kill the pain?’ ‘No. It just sets it in a corner.’ ” At another point, the work gets across the exuberance that the characters feel when performing music: “Jake grinned and covered his ears. Belle looked like she was howling, but he couldn’t hear her.” Although the previous two books in the series worked well as stand-alone YA novels, this one relies more heavily on storylines established in the earlier volumes; as such, fans of the Croy Cycle are sure to appreciate this latest entry, but new readers would do well to catch up with previous books first. Overall, it feels less like a standard YA tale than a larger story of small-town life and the interactions of families that have deep, interconnected roots. As in the previous entries, there’s a queer coming-of-age storyline, but here, it’s somewhat diluted by other, less urgent plotlines. For example, the library sculpture seems to hold a lot of metaphorical weight, but the reader may have trouble getting too invested in its fate. (Crosby’s occasional black-and-white line drawings feature characters and objects from the text.)
A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73473-897-1
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Les Croyens Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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