Hard but hopeful tales of middle America, addiction, and the human condition.
Residents of a Rust Belt town dream, scheme, get high, get sober, and start over in Gardner’s gritty collection of linked short stories.
“I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered: Oxycontin, Xanax, blunts, and booze.” So begins the first, titular story in Gardner’s collection; its unnamed narrator, an aspiring writer, hopes to pen a novel about the opioid epidemic, with his own addiction thinly veiled as “immersive research.” Gardner’s characters, too, desire drugs, but they want more than that: escape, a new direction, to make peace with the past and build anew. They pursue these similar ends in myriad ways. For example, the cast of “Delinquents” pins their hopes for deliverance on a homemade rocket ship; the protagonist of “Lifers, Locals, and Hangers-on,” suffocated by the monotony of her life, sees in a visiting cowboy the possibility of far-off adventure. In “Digging,” a character seeks comfort in a relationship with a younger man who’s troubled by self-loathing and fixated on a violent episode in local history. The collection’s longest story, a novella titled “Captain Failure,” focuses on a recurring character named Dunk, unveiling his traumatic past as an ex-cult member. He seeks a peace that eludes him, even in sobriety, until he’s hired to consult on a movie about the cult, forcing him to confront his childhood. It’s notable that few of Gardner’s characters ever actually leave their town of Westinghouse, Ohio; instead, they seek relief in each other, themselves, intoxication, or sobriety. The author masterfully switches up the pace with writing that’s alternately blunt, frenzied, and meditative to evoke the grinding conditions of his characters’ lives, the elasticity of time in Westinghouse, and the unique manifestations of shared desperation for something more. Gardner seems uninterested in a traditional sort of redemption for his characters, instead forcing readers to meet them on their terms. The result is a propulsive and startlingly moving collection.
Hard but hopeful tales of middle America, addiction, and the human condition.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781960593030
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Madrona Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
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