A boisterous, stylish novel about fathers, sons, and the messiness of American life.
In Casey’s debut novel, a powerful city council member and his offspring separately attempt to atone for past mistakes.
Dan Hurley is a seasoned Chicago pol, educated at the foot of Ed O’Brien, the city’s long-serving Irish mayor, and his powerful friends in government. As a member of the city council, Dan became notorious for his work on behalf of the Democratic political machine, but as he reaches the end of his career, a dispute over a warehouse arises between the new mayor and a Westside minister. The situation presents Dan with an opportunity to possibly undo some of the cynical maneuvers that characterized his time in office. Meanwhile, Dan’s estranged son, Billy, is living a life of frustrated potential above a tavern in a small Wisconsin town, where he rents canoes to tourists. As he prepares for a new custody trial—with an aim to get back the children he lost due to his drug and alcohol abuse—Dan’s sudden death allows Billy to reevaluate his father and perhaps help to change the man’s legacy. Over the course of the novel, Casey proves himself to be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Chicago politics. The first chapter, narrated by Dan, offers a particularly wonderful warts-and-all portrait of lawmaking: “So I’m in my chair, front and center, ringmaster in the Council chambers, the mayor presides, his minions atwitter, my aldermanic brethren lounge around and about me, in cushy red chairs with the city seal, cameras, red lights on, along the wall.” The prose is similarly, and remarkably, energetic throughout the remainder of the work. However, the plot loses some steam after it becomes Billy’s own story, and a length of 500-plus pages seems unnecessary. Even so, the novel, which is set in the mid-1980s, feels very much like an engaging artifact of that era, and after discovering it, readers will look forward to whatever future projects Casey has up his sleeve.
A boisterous, stylish novel about fathers, sons, and the messiness of American life.Pub Date: July 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-835623-1
Page Count: 476
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
