Wittily observant and achingly tender.
A coming-of-age story about an Indian American girl struggling to figure out many things about herself, such as whether she and her sister should kill a relative.
It’s the summer of 1986, dead solid center in the middle of the Reagan decade, and sisters Georgette Ayyar and Agatha Krishna Creel are trying to make the best they can of awkward pre-adolescence in the oil town of Marley, Wyoming. They are daughters of Indian parents, Girl Scouts, Catholic school students, and named after their mother’s favorite authors—Heyer and Christie, respectively. “We were named after proper white ladies, even if we ourselves were never proper anything,” Georgie recalls. They are taken aback when their placid lives are disrupted by the arrival from India of their mother’s brother, Vinny, his wife, Devi, and their son, Narayan, who are all moving into their Cottonwood Cross home to stay. “Vinny Uncle made us shadow people,” Georgie says. And it is for the reason of feeling somehow split in two (“like freeze tag,” Georgie argues) that she and Agatha decide that Vinny Uncle must die. Their method: sneaking small amounts of antifreeze into his drinks. “Bright Mountain Dew in big cups,” Georgie recounts. “It was surprisingly easy to make him sick.” As her uncle gets gradually sicker, Georgie attends summer camp, watches the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, takes part in the local county fair and Fashion Revue, and waits for something to happen. Along the way, the narrative takes sardonic divergences, mostly in the form of multiple-choice romance questionnaires like the kind found in magazines. Examples: “How Do You Know If You’re Ready To Have a Sexual Relationship?”; “Is He Bad for You?” and, even, “Do You Have What It Takes To Kill?” Which is something Georgie finds herself asking, even as she and her sister are carrying out this inexplicable mission, for which they blame, among other things, British colonialism. Though framed like a funny, ferociously allusive grown-up version of a YA whodunit, McConigley’s debut novel carries deeper, knottier mysteries than the curious crime at its center.
Wittily observant and achingly tender.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593702246
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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