A bittersweet selection of well-told L.A. stories, spanning gang lockups to movie-director mansions.
Harris’ story collection focuses on Los Angeles characters from all walks of life, shaken from their routines by startling chance encounters and unexpected relationships.
The author presents a collection of Los Angeles–centered short stories, typically involving a clash of personalities when characters come together (sometimes in a meaningful fashion, other times, well…). The title tale introduces Morris, a restless, middle-aged tax accountant who encounters Sofia, a rebellious teen from a privileged girls’ school, vandalizing luxury cars in retribution for climate change. Even though she considers him a class enemy, they somehow form a fragile bond (“Watching him leave, Sofia felt a hollow opening up inside her that she couldn’t explain. No other adults would let her speak to them the way she did to Morris”). Cary, the hard-luck protagonist of “The Cactus,” a washed-up athlete turned washed-up movie stuntman turned insurance man, finally meets his life mate in the person of an accident-case client, Sheila, who is particularly enchanted by an exotic flowering cactus he keeps. In “Doubles,” a divorced freelance writer and minor true-crime author is asked by a tennis partner for referrals on hoodlum types who can intervene in a sexual blackmail plot. Harris is not one for tidy endings in neat packages, leaving the reader hanging with tantalizing suggestions of what might happen next, as in “Mute,” in which a film director’s marriage disintegrates under the stress of raising an autistic child, or in “Chicken Soup,” with its battle of wills between an obstinate dowager and the undocumented Latinx woman hired as her caregiver. While the settings occasionally depict a Hollywood milieu of screenwriters, wannabe stars, and other creatives (the author is an established filmmaker), the material is not as arch as work by other chroniclers of Tinseltown, such as Bruce Wagner, Steve Martin, and Peter Lefcourt. Harris’ stories skew more broadly, recalling Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s vignettes of relatable people yearning for connection.
A bittersweet selection of well-told L.A. stories, spanning gang lockups to movie-director mansions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781639889891
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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