Tender little stories that will make you gasp and squirm.
A revised, expanded edition of Milks’ transgressive debut collection, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, originally published in 2014.
Twinship, sexual relationships, parent-child relationships, and friendships are the subjects of this hypersexual and hyperconfrontational short story collection. The author pushes every boundary and taboo, exploring how a pairing can result in one person’s dominating another or changing for another. The opening story, “Slug,” establishes the themes of free discovery and creative sexuality. A woman has sex with—and is transformed by—a giant slug following a date with a disappointing man. Human-animal erotic pairings are explored further in “Wild Animals,” in which a VHS bestiality porno “infects” a character’s mind and sexual behaviors: “There, in that other realm, was a rhythm so fixed that bodies don’t need to be.” Human-tech connections and imaginative pairings of body parts abound in daring tales that challenge certainties about gender, fantasy, and identity. Trans characters and transitions of all kinds are frequent subjects; characters’ genders and identities are malleable: “He and she can mean anything.” The author asks questions about queer communities and how they define themselves. These tales often allude to touchstones like Seventeen magazine, The Babysitter’s Club, My Little Pony, video games, and the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Milks uses the framework or style of the source as a scaffold, but their insights about relationships are fresh and original; these are stories about deep pain, shame, lust, and love. Speculative elements are frequent, as in “The Strands,” in which a woman’s former lover’s hair grows to cover an entire apartment. One of the most arresting tales is “Patrick Gets Inspired,” an autofictional examination of an author’s attempt to write Covid pornography. It deals with infection, consummation, and release: “Spit. Droplets. Breath. Vehicles of contagion. Objects of fear.”
Tender little stories that will make you gasp and squirm.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952177-84-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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