A wise and uncanny roux of Erdrich’s storytelling.
Thirteen pungent stories conjure a tender strangeness, set amid the woodcut-like drawings of the author’s daughter Aza Erdrich Abe.
The much-valorized Erdrich has 19 novels to her credit, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Night Watchman (2020) and The Round House (2012), which received the National Book Award. This is only her second collection of short fiction, following The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008. Eleven of the stories in that first batch eventually fleshed out into novels; the current book contains five pieces first published in The New Yorker. That includes the title story, in which a girl, 8 as the tale begins, ponders the cruelty of captivity via a guard dog, Nero: “He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents.” The child considers Nero’s multiple escapes, tosses him gingersnaps, chronicles the decline of his “white wolf” beauty until he’s unrecognizable except in the afterlife. The twinning of animals and children is an Erdrich trademark, marbling her fiction with a generous earthiness. The child narrating “Amelia,” a stand-out entry, survives poverty and loneliness and waitressing (another Erdrich signature) partly through the friendship of an older bachelor, and in doing so defies their town’s low expectations, as he did. Erdrich, bard of the Upper Midwestern landscape, writes of a school bus full of kids caught in a lethal snowstorm, “The wind toyed with the bus, sometimes booming at its sides, sometimes sliding with a low whistle along the window tops. At times, it reached below the hood and shook the engine like a baby’s toy rattle.” These stories stray across decades and continents, include a Venetian vampire and a woman whose central relationship is with a mysterious stone. The two speculative stories set in a disembodied future are less successful but still contain clever reversals. And the stunning “December 26,” the most tragic tale, is leavened by a “very dear little baby with a jubilant attitude and a topknot.”
A wise and uncanny roux of Erdrich’s storytelling.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780063375000
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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