Overstuffed, but a daring foray into a genre that’s seen little recent experimentation.
Danielewski turns from postmodern confections to a decidedly untraditional take on the Western.
Kalin March is the new kid in the tidy Utah town of Orvop (read Provo). There, because he’s wearing odd shoes—“like a moccasin, only too worn for even the poorest Indian, and blue, though a blue faded to near gray, with leather laces and rubber soles”—he’s bullied by football star Lindsey Holt, whose best friend is the smart, mischievous Tom Gatestone, who “weren’t ever a brutal boy.” Kalin wins their respect for two reasons: He can’t fight, but he doesn’t run; and, though small for his age, he’s a master on horseback. Therein lies the nub of Danielewski’s long, long story, which commences with the promise of “so much awful horror” occasioned by two horses, Navidad and Mouse, slated for slaughter by local patriarch Orwin Porch, “or Old Porch as he was called, though he weren’t but fifty-nine.” Kalin steals the two death-bound horses and heads into the mountains above Orvop, having promised Tom, who has died of a terrible cancer, that he would free them. Apologies for that spoiler, which takes place in the opening section, but Tom will become an important presence later in the narrative, a ghostly guide through the impassible mountains, even as Tom’s living sister, Landry, catches up to Kalin and partakes in a slowly unfolding adventure that involves a whole lot of bloodshed. With echoes of The Iliad and a body count to rival Blood Meridian, morphing from Western to horror to police procedural and back again, Danielewski’s yarn is carefully plotted and imaginatively written. Its only flaw is its excessive length, as if the author were in a race with William T. Vollmann; at only a couple of dozen pages shorter than War and Peace, it serves as a pointed lesson in the fact that life—as so many of Danielewski’s characters discover—is short indeed.
Overstuffed, but a daring foray into a genre that’s seen little recent experimentation.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781524747718
Page Count: 1232
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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