Eclectic tales take readers through jolts, inspired moments, and endless awe.
Bobe’s motley collection of short stories delivers drama, weird creatures, and horrors.
In the opening story, “Fins,” a woman gradually develops gills and a tail every time she’s in water. She’s becoming something else, but a full transformation could mean leaving behind the life she knows. This is just one of a handful of genres that Bobe expertly tackles. The heartfelt “All of His Loved Ones” stars a funeral director struggling to accommodate a family that wants a beloved elephant at their uncle’s outdoor service. The disconcerting “Husband” follows Delila Ryan, whose husband, Henry, insists he’s named Scott Ryan and that she’s confusing details of their marriage. The theme of family ties the diverse tales together, from a cabal of witches with secrets in their past to the fractured unity of a father, sons, and daughter whose matriarch has left them. The author excels at driving readers toward unexpected turns. “The Tuesday Murders,” for example, is a potent take on the familiar Groundhog Day scenario in which a woman takes drastic measures against a potential stalker, her apathetic boss, and her harassing co-workers. Other stories’ unpredictability fuels an obscure but ominous horror. In the standout “The Hum,” Maria starts working at a small-town library. As if locals’ discussions of an incessant “hum” Maria can’t hear isn’t unnerving enough, there’s also the previous employee who has mysteriously disappeared. It all culminates in a doozy of an ending. Bobe’s vibrant metaphors (“Her voice is a twist of green tendrils, bright like poison, alluring like spindles or a locked box. This house, with its clocks out of sync and no screens on the windows, might as well be a flowering vine”) only strengthen this inventive, creepy collection.
Eclectic tales take readers through jolts, inspired moments, and endless awe.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-72-937577-6
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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