Through friendship, punk rock, and teamwork, a handful of people rebel against this Orwellian future.
Citizens struggle to subsist in a low-wage gig economy driven by an oppressive phone app.
In the not-so-distant gloomy future, giant tech companies control everyone’s lives. A phone app tells workers they must report to a job that typically involves cleaning or painting for long stretches of time. They go home to tiny apartments, contemplate their existential boredom, sleep, and wait for the next gig alert. And yet, as revealed in the six interwoven chapters of this graphic novel, spirited individuals and groups find ways to rebel. Illustrator Smith has a colorful, soft, detailed style that adds playfulness to this dark tale. And author Mosedale adds humor, hope, sarcasm, and genuine human connection to an otherwise bleak story that, at nearly 300 pages, allows the six stories to breathe and unfold in interesting, cinematic ways. We’re in no rush to get to the end because we’re given clues all along that the people in this city will find a way to make it, and we want to spend time with them to see how things pan out. An aging punk rocker sneaks outside her senior living facility to smoke joints and makes a new friend. A bike messenger delivers library books to people and invites them to secret raves. A graffiti artist paints elaborate anti-establishment works on the side of a building at night. A grumpy middle-aged private detective must learn how to play an augmented reality running game and get back in shape to hunt down a suspect. A man runs 100 miles outside the city through a desolate countryside to deliver a package of seeds. An accident in a space station filled with gig workers, which is orbiting Earth, sends the satellite crashing into the ocean, where anarchists have converted an oil rig into a floating guerrilla kelp farm with horizontal self-governance. And an unexpected delivery from a drone army could bring about a new beginning. In this world, the future is bleak but hope and ingenuity are hiding in plain sight.
Through friendship, punk rock, and teamwork, a handful of people rebel against this Orwellian future.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781603095938
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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