A joy to read.
A young African girl with seerlike awareness of the past comes of age.
Before Ayosa Ataraxis Brown was born, no more than “a wriggling thing, unbound, light as a Sunday morning thought,” she was granted access to the traumatic, layered memories of her mother’s past. Fittingly, a kind of strife has always marked Ayosa’s relationship with her mother, Nabumbo Promise, a mercurial photographer who shares her daughter’s willful spirit and is disturbed by the girl’s preternatural knowledge. Now almost 13, Ayosa lives alone in the small village of Mapeli Town in a manor that belonged to her great-grandmother—an Englishwoman named Mabel Brown whose wealth spurred the town’s founding—while Nabumbo Promise disappears on work assignments for months on end. As Ayosa awaits her mother’s return with a mix of love and anger, ever wary of body-snatching wraiths that might impersonate Nabumbo Promise, she whiles away time with the enigmatic neighbors—Sindano, the owner of a visitorless cafe, and Jentrix, the town’s apothecary—who provide clues into the Brown family’s deep links with the town’s traumas; she also forms a powerful bond to free-spirited Mbiu, a motherless girl who observes Ayosa through the manor’s windows. Nabumbo Promise returns at last, but her relationship with Ayosa grows thornier as the two clash over the painful rifts in their relationship and Nabumbo Promise begins to detach from reality. Debut author Oduor renders this fantastical world so tangibly it almost leaps off the page—a feat aided by her stunning language: A hornet’s nest is an “enormous papery capsule writhing above them, full of murder and full of nectar”; Ayosa experiences “nights where her body unravel[s] from itself like yarn from a spool.” There’s a complex emotional current animating Ayosa’s relationship with her mother as the two vacillate between disdain and desperate, intense love, lending the narrative a sense of momentum and depth. Though sometimes strained by an abundance of colorful characters, this novel is lively and original; it is a captivating journey from start to finish.
A joy to read.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982102-57-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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