Oozing with style but wanting for substance.
In 2016 Los Angeles, a wealthy college dropout and her former professor trade academia for opiates.
When New York University art student Susie Vogelman finds her roommate dead of an OxyContin overdose, she palms the remaining pills and checks into the Carlyle Hotel. There, she orders room service and gets high with her favorite teacher, Phil Krolik, until the school finally contacts her parents. Susie then moves back home to her family’s Brentwood mansion, where she passes time by the pool in a stoned daze, only exiting the community’s gates for meetups with her dealer, Royal-Lee. Phil, newly fired, cashes in his trust fund and goes in search of his twin brother, Peter, an unhoused addict last seen in LA. Hoping to attract and eventually help Peter, Phil buys the Villa—a turnkey, fully subsidized rehab center run out of an apartment building in West Adams. The work is harder and less profitable than Phil anticipated, so he joins the Church of White Illumination, a secret society of rich and powerful men. With the connections he makes, and with Royal-Lee’s assistance, Phil begins providing drugs to his residents so they’ll participate in the facility’s programming. As Susie’s and Phil’s paths inexorably reconverge, the mutilated corpses of junkies start turning up in seedy motels all over Hollywood. Goebel’s novel takes the guise of a roman à clef written by Susie after the fact, the introduction teasing Phil’s, Royal-Lee’s, and Susie’s own entanglement with these killings. Shot through with the sort of pseudo-profundity endemic to youthful privilege, Susie’s rambling, terminally jaundiced narrative paints a darkly surreal Lynch- and Kubrick-inspired portrait of LA. Regrettably, while Goebel’s sentence-level writing is undeniably artful, his plot lacks coherence, sapping the tale of impact and drive.
Oozing with style but wanting for substance.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781636284651
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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