A humorous but disappointingly stunted tale about a would-be poet’s adventures.
Chaos ensues after a man at a crossroads reaches out to an old flame in this comic sequel.
Seattle, 1989. Aspiring poet and habitual weed smoker Jasper Trueblood, 30, is leaving his partying ways behind. He enjoys his job teaching English as a second language at a community college—a position in which he makes frequent use of a ventriloquist dummy named Bosworth—and he’s engaged. Of course, his fiancee, Daphne, is still a bit of a party animal, and they don’t have too much in common outside of a certain insatiable lust for each other—but how long can that last? Not very long at all, it turns out, as Jasper learns when he comes home early to find Daphne enjoying the lust of another man. During the resulting personal crisis, Jasper decides to buy a ticket to Guam to drop in on his old college girlfriend, Lani Sablan, without contacting her first. He expects Lani to be shocked, but actually she foresaw Jasper’s arrival in a dream—though that doesn’t change the fact that he is in very real danger from her meth-dealing husband. After a brief stay on the island, Jasper escapes with his life back to Seattle, thinking his trip down Memory Lane is over. But a few months later, he gets a call from Lani, who wants to bring her daughter, Rose, to the Pacific Northwest and stay with Jasper. “I’m an emotional wreck, Jazz,” she tells him. “My tropical depression evolved into an all-out typhoon. I need a new start. Rose does, too. I’ve never been to Seattle, but I hear it’s beautiful.” Is Jasper about to finally have the adult life—and adult love—that he’s dreamed of? Maybe. But it will involve quite a bit of tragedy, a prison sentence, and several sessions of talk therapy with a stripper named Ginger Snap.
Hickey has a natural way with words. His descriptions are original and often quite funny. Daphne, for example, is an “ever-slumbering but ever-amorous opossum.” But the writing is sometimes a bit too cute, particularly the dialogue, which often seems to serve no purpose other than to momentarily amuse readers. The question of why is a recurring one. For example, why do all the characters seem so taken with Jasper, an overweight, horny, perpetually stoned man with a ventriloquist dummy? (Readers, by contrast, will struggle to find him charming.) There is a larger question regarding just what the novel is trying to say. Potential thesis statements are littered throughout the text—many of them spoken by Ginger Snap, a walking, talking male fantasy that bears little resemblance to a human woman—but by the end, the book does not succeed in being about anything. Nor is it just a simple lark, given a particular and needless death that the author has seen fit to include. The story’s female characters, who should be intriguing, are ultimately only there for the redemption narrative of the decidedly uninteresting Jasper. The experience will be an unsatisfying one for many readers.
A humorous but disappointingly stunted tale about a would-be poet’s adventures.Pub Date: March 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-877891-4
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Painted Rock Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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