A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty.
A coming-of-age story in which the main character is, literally, out of this world.
In Northeast Philadelphia, in the Earth year 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a woman destined to be a single mother. The baby is too small, and her mother, observing her under the hospital phototherapy lamp, thinks she looks “other than human. Plant or marine life, maybe. An orchid or otter. A shrimp.” One reason for this might be the lamp’s unearthly blue-green light, or the fact that the baby is early and the mother traumatized by her difficult birth. Another might be the fact that Adina is actually otherworldly, an alien life form from a planet 300,000 light-years away, sent to infiltrate human society and “take notes.” This Adina does assiduously all throughout her childhood and adolescence in 1980s and '90s Philadelphia, where she lives with her Earth mother in a poor, ethnically Italian neighborhood that is slowly sinking into the toxic ground on which it was built. The notes themselves—winsome observations on the nature of the creatures that surround her (animal, vegetable, and, most mysteriously, human)—are sent via a fax machine Adina’s Earth mother scavenges from the trash and sets up in her bedroom. Adina’s extraterrestrial superiors return encouragement via interstellar fax and offer occasional instruction through telepathic dreams that take place in their best approximation of what an Earth classroom might look like. As Adina grows and her circle of influence widens to include her tough but loving mother, her iconoclastic friend Toni and Toni’s film-buff brother Dominic, enemies, loves, false friends, and the other characters of a well-rounded Earth existence, Adina becomes more and more aware of how different she feels from her Earthling friends, even as her life follows the pattern of their joys and sorrows. A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino’s masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales—so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary.
A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780374109288
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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 tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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