A surprising and moving account of a man’s connection to his home.
A defiant man fights for his right to continue logging on his property in Thorp’s novel.
Don Karlsson, a logger, is first introduced to readers raising his middle finger to a crew of firefighters. Don, who “spent most of his childhood doing precisely whatever he was told not to do,” became more responsible after marrying and having three children, but his anti-authority streak remains. Whether they be firefighters, a professor in search of a new species, or the local sheriff, Don treats everyone who steps foot on his property with suspicion, expressing his feelings in a sporadic Faulkner-lite internal monologue: “That’s when I see them lawmen for the first time. Serious lookin’ fellas. When one shows up, he’s here for a talk. When it’s more than one, it’s certain they’re takin’ someone with ‘em with they leave.” When a new species of vole is discovered on his property, Don is prevented from cutting down any of the trees that he’s planted there throughout his life. To gain back his freedom (as he sees it), Don calls on his three adult children, all with differing opinions on his best course of action. What follows turns into a legal thriller, with informants and major revelations in trial scenes. Though the narrative moves in a more conventional direction in the second half, Thorp’s novel is distinctive in its layering of facts about the geography, the aforementioned shifts into Don’s perspective, and a deep bench of side characters brought richly to life. If the pacing occasionally stalls as the text is interrupted by departures into descriptions of nature, the prose is often beautiful: “The house with its tin roof and clapboard siding, dirty and decaying, is the remnant of a dream, an embodiment of one man’s struggle to find a place in the world, a tiny corner of the great globe he could once and forever call his own.”
A surprising and moving account of a man’s connection to his home.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798992040548
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Type Eighteen Books
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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