A playful comedy that delivers more silliness than outright laughs.
A fast-food mogul desperately yearns for respectability and is willing to do extreme things to get it in Schmidt’s farcical novel.
By all objective measures, Phil Ochs is a successful businessman. Despite descending from a “pedigree of losers,” as he thinks of it, he’s built a fast-food empire in South Carolina, made up of 17 Fry Buddy franchises. Nevertheless, he remains dogged by the feeling that he hasn’t received the respect he deserves, and he remains annoyed by the fact that he shares a name with a famous liberal folksinger—a terrible yoke for a “committed conservative”: “You don’t know the burden it’s been to drag that hippie’s weight up the ladder.” To make matters worse, he longs to win the Outstanding Entrepreneur award from the Chamber of Commerce; this year, he’s losing out to a company that produces fake testicles for neutered pets. Frustrated that his adult son, David Samuel, is, in his view, an “over-sensitive, disgraceful goddamn mooch,” he pays a teenager to beat his offspring up, hoping the experience will usher him into manhood. David Samuel’s fantastical depiction of the assault is among the farce’s comedic highlights, as when he imagines his assailants’ thoughts about him: “His grace intimidates me! Me too! Even a thug like me can feel the elegance of his spirit! The devil has presented us a martyr for our adolescent rage, our wild, brutish passion!” Phil finally decides to run for state senate, and uses that opportunity to reinvent himself, allowing voters to come up with a new middle name for him. The entire book is written with nimble enthusiasm, and some of it is very funny, indeed. However, the author’s comedic stylings can hit lower registers at times, as with some of the middle names that the public suggests, such as “Phil Mummy-Fart Ochs,” “Phil Dinosaur Ochs,” and “Phil R.I.P. Ochs.” Also, the book’s inventiveness unfortunately fizzles out long before its conclusion; one may wish that the author had set about crafting a novel that was half as long.
A playful comedy that delivers more silliness than outright laughs.Pub Date: May 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956769-13-5
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Library Tales Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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