A well-guided journey along the boundary between faith and doubt.
A journalist struggles to uncover a mysterious sect’s secrets—and his own.
When magazine journalist Faruq Zaidi departs on an immersion project that takes him inside a religious group known only as “the nameless,” the committed atheist thinks he’s leaving behind his own emotional turmoil following the death of his father, a devout Muslim, a year earlier. Led by Odo, an aging but vital Black Vietnam War veteran, the collective operates from a highly developed base known as the Forbidden City in California’s redwood country. Following a set of principles known as the “18 Utterances,” its members get “hipped” and are urged to remove “distortion” from their lives as they espouse an enigmatic philosophy they say emphasizes “seeing beauty and making beauty,” while believing that “death is a beautiful thing too.” In alternating sections, Cuffy intersperses the story of Faruq’s effort to overcome the increasingly puzzling and ominous obstacles to penetrating the group’s essence with the script of a documentary about the nameless’ bitter, highly publicized clash with a fundamentalist Christian church at its founding site in a small Texas town and vivid scenes of Odo’s terrifying, disillusioning experience as a teenage foot soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. As Faruq’s projected six-week reporting assignment stretches into months, his questions about the nature of the nameless and its leader’s motivations and true beliefs only grow deeper. All the while, he wrestles with his own lack of faith, along with lingering grief over the sudden death of his mother when he was 12 and the way anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the 9/11 attack only a week afterward robbed him of the opportunity to mourn her passing properly. In exploring this corner of American religious life, Cuffy follows the recent work of Bret Anthony Johnston (We Burn Daylight, 2024) and Daniel Torday (The 12th Commandment, 2023) that dealt with religious cults, but she approaches the subject with a fresh, multifaceted perspective that makes it uniquely hers.
A well-guided journey along the boundary between faith and doubt.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593597446
Page Count: 464
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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