A page-turning vision of a future made all too plausible by our volatile present.
A dystopian fantasy in which our present-day racial hierarchies and caste prejudices are ramped up—as are the humiliations, cruelties, and perils that go with them.
Askaripour follows up his debut, Black Buck (2021), by imagining an America even more divided by region and race 500 years into the future. By then, the world’s land masses are designated as hemispheres rather than continents and nations. The action takes place in the Northwestern Hemisphere, whose people are divided between what’s called the Dominant Population, or DPs, and Invisibles, second-class citizens denied opportunities and rights because they aren’t fully “seen” by DPs, who demean, ostracize, and even brutalize them when their presence is acknowledged. One of these Invisibles is Candace, who also goes by Sweetmint, a young woman whose intelligence and determination lead to a coveted apprenticeship with Croger Tenmase, an illustrious inventor considered a mystifying eccentric by his fellow DPs. Among the many tribulations Sweetmint has had to overcome is the disappearance of her older brother, Shanu. Still, she flourishes under Tenmase’s guidance until her world crashes around her with the news that Shanu is the primary suspect in the assassination of the hemisphere’s chief executive. Sweetmint leaves Tenmase’s haven to search for Shanu, hoping to find him before the authorities do. Her principal nemeses are Curts, the hemispheric guard director, and Stephan Jolis, a ruthless young aspirant for the executive’s job, pledging greater repression of the Invisibles if elected. Askaripour, whose first novel was a satire of class and racial transactions in corporate America, exhibits some of the same hard-driving and, at times, heavy-handed depictions of bigotry here. The author infuses his conscientious worldbuilding with audacity and intricacy down to the social rituals and the epithets casually hurled at minorities. (In this future Earth, the words “Black” and “white” are never explicitly used to classify characters.) And as the propulsive narrative runs its course, the interactions between social castes become subtler and less predictable, especially toward the book’s stunning, even stinging, conclusion.
A page-turning vision of a future made all too plausible by our volatile present.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472347
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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