Durable characters, set in a new but familiar frame.
Two American folk heroes join forces in the name of democracy.
Cecil’s sprightly debut is an adventure tale set around the late 1800s, but it retools the Paul Bunyan and John Henry myths with an eye on today’s postcapitalist hellscape. Bunyan is a stout laborer in a polluted company town mining a fuel called Lump; when his wife, Lucette, is poisoned by Lump runoff, he’s compelled to head to “the Windy City” and appeal to the company CEO, the cartoonish (and nakedly Trumpish) industrialist El Boffo, who’s using Lump to develop an all-healing device. But access to El Boffo requires that the gentle giant defeat all comers in a boxing ring. He battles his final adversary, steel-driver John Henry, to a draw; realizing they’re better off working together, they scheme to find a cure for Lucette and a way to bring Henry’s family to Canada and escape slave catchers. They have the assistance of a folk creature’s vague advice and a literal guiding light called the Gleam that will deliver the pair to the title’s “Beautiful Destiny.” Cecil has plainly inhaled not just the details of the Bunyan and Henry myths but the hyperbolic rhetoric of adventure tales; the novel is rife with cliffhanger chapter endings and feats of derring-do. That makes it a likable page-turner, but also a predictable one. The story is peppered with platitudes about capitalism (“Nothing lives in America unless it turns a profit, and nothing dies as long as it does”), and El Boffo’s character is so nakedly villainous that his machinations (and fate) become uninteresting. The idea of using two idealized American folk characters to show how short the country has fallen is an inspired one with lots of potential, but here it’s mostly serving a binary good-versus-evil melodrama.
Durable characters, set in a new but familiar frame.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593471166
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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