Sprawling magical realistic stories with a moral bent.
Magical realism and myth meet dystopic themes in this debut collection of short fiction set in the Americas.
Set against a backdrop of political inequities, climate catastrophes, and other crises, Rubio’s stories offer alternative ways of squaring injustices (or getting revenge), beginning with “Brujería for Beginners,” a second-person, instructional story about learning “spiritual vigilantism or expedited karma.” “Calling it black magic,” the teacher insists, “is devoid of context,” especially when the context in question is domestic abuse. Similarly, in “Tunnels,” the Fogata family, fed up with the racism and violence in 1990s California, hatches up a plot to release pigeons emitting powerful electromagnetic pulses that bring the entire Southwest to a grinding halt. A magic mirror that transports the viewer to other versions of life allows the narrator of “Carlos Across Time and Space,” one of the collection’s standouts, to picture a different death for Carlos, who was senselessly murdered at a high school graduation party. Magical possibilities compete with reason and often win, especially for characters who are ill-served by what society serves up for them. In “Burial,” another fine story, a girl who is an outcast at school because she once tried to save a hummingbird is saved twice by tigers. Rubio is an extravagant storyteller; her prose thrums with life, and her plots take hairpin turns. All of this is on full display in “Maria, Maria,” a sweeping story that leaps backward and forward in time and from perspective to perspective as it traces the fates of three women all the way back to a mythic world. Except for a few of the more formally experimental stories (“Art Show” and “Paint by Numbers”) that fall flat, this is transporting work.
Sprawling magical realistic stories with a moral bent.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-09054-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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