A sometimes-perplexing tale of misery, despite extensive characterization.
In Luxxor’s novel, two broken souls in Manhattan—a fresh-faced newcomer and a jaded native New Yorker—get caught in a complex web of transgressions.
It’s a sparkling summer evening in the city when Lincoln Sorni notices Derrick Passeri for the first time. Lincoln, a 20-year-old transplant to New York from Mexico who escaped an abusive father, spends his days dressing up as Spider-Man in Times Square for tips and his evenings as a busboy in a Hell’s Kitchen nightclub. When he notices Derrick’s dazzling smile at the club one night, he believes that he’s found someone special; however, when they speak to each other for the first time a week later, Derrick is morose and wants nothing to do with him: “You can’t afford me” is his response when Lincoln asks if he’s a personal trainer (“It’s been known across ages that gay men would use this question as a way to get a man’s attention”). Despite this initial rebuff, Derrick invites Lincoln out one night, seemingly on a whim, which thrusts him into a new world where he’s judged for his looks, coerced into taking drugs, and having intense sexual encounters with strangers. Lincoln finds himself wanting to conform to Derrick’s standards, but he also become preoccupied with unraveling the mystery of the stranger’s bitter past. Luxxor’s novella is a tragedy turned up to the highest volume. It heavily focuses on elements of sexual assault, substance abuse, and emotional abuse throughout the narrative, and Lincoln, Derrick, and the supporting characters—including Derrick’s ambitious best friend, RedSaint,and Lincoln’s sexually repressed coworker, Santiago—all suffer greatly. Along the way, the author effectively scatters the backstories of various characters throughout the novella. However, certain revelations feel somewhat ill-timed, which makes it difficult to understand some characters’ motivations for much of the narrative. The book briefly touches on thought-provoking themes of identity and rebirth, as both Lincoln and Derrick decide to change their names to move up in the world, but this thread is ultimately left dangling.
A sometimes-perplexing tale of misery, despite extensive characterization.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798992348835
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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