Darkly entertaining yarns about people trying to bridge the gap between shabby reality and improbable dreams.
Grand visions intrude into banal lives in this sometimes-hangdog, sometimes-luminous debut story collection.
Zasada’s tales foreground mostly underachieving protagonists whose disappointments are heightened by an uneasy feeling of unfulfilled purpose. A New York deli manager eating a sandwich in Central Park has an enigmatic vision of a mountain, a river, and raging horses; a rock star who finds his life increasingly frenetic but hollow puts off his suicide plan only to accidentally overdose and fall into a coma filled with dreams of heaven and hell; a young couple whose lives are a blithe, nonmaterialistic idyll break up when the man starts to feel stirrings of ambition; a closeted gay political operative in Portland rescues a vagrant injured in a bike crash who turns out to be the golden boy he had a crush on in high school; a dismissed Pakistani government functionary who thinks of California as a paradise of honesty and nubile women gets a chance at a lucrative new berth in the bureaucracy, but only if he cooperates with sleazy bribery schemes; a middle-class man comes into a fortune but struggles to translate it into a happy or meaningful life; a professor communes with the shade of a long-dead Jewish philosopher who teaches her that death is more productive than life; an 18th-century Native American in California who has seen his world collapse with the arrival of Spanish conquerors goes in search of the mythic source of the world’s water; an American greenhorn in Australia sets out on a yacht voyage into fearsome Pacific waters and takes on a crew of chatty ghosts; and a Jewish man saved from certain death by his mother’s magical incantation spends his life wondering if his survival was mere luck or a sign of a higher destiny.
Zasada’s stories form a connected cycle, with characters and motifs popping up in several narratives in a common fictive world centered on a few resonant themes. The stories are capacious and sweeping, often taking characters from childhood to old age to fit their seemingly haphazard experiences into a larger arc. Zasada combines pitch-perfect renditions of small, dejected lives (“That night, alone, Mickey drank tequila from a shot glass and sat by a window, looking out at the sleepless street below his apartment. He felt all wrong—just all wrong”) with evocations of the cosmic sublime that they feel is looming just beyond their reach (“He lay on his back for a full hour looking up through a small opening in a stand of tall straight pines as the sky became star-filled and infinite…he was conscious of the mountain beneath his body pressing toward a secret and jagged hole leading into a greater universe”). Spanning these two registers are his characters’ clumsy but penetrating stabs at philosophizing: “As for the Incantation, it’s all just coincidence. Some old mumbo jumbo and selective observation….I don’t like the boys hearing any of that crap. Like religion, it confuses them. And it makes them think there’s like, some way out of things, when there’s not. There’s no way out of things.” By turns funny, touching, and bleakly ruminative, Zasada’s yarns captivate as their characters struggle to reconcile their vast yearnings with the meager victories that the world begrudges them.
Darkly entertaining yarns about people trying to bridge the gap between shabby reality and improbable dreams.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-88585-8
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Upper Story Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
