A fast-talking, ball-juggling tall tale about long shots, escape attempts, and other bad decisions.
An ambitious but aimless street hustler becomes a rolling stone when he’s dragged into a bank job gone awry.
What to make of a character who’s so much like his creator—gifted in weird and dazzling ways, prone to misadventure, and with a persistent habit of talking about his junk? This could be the fictional biography of the verbal half of Penn & Teller had things gone badly wrong once. Here the raconteur injects himself into lead character Poe Legette, a well-meaning ne’er-do-well making his way through the rock ’n’ roll 1970s. Poe is a graduate of clown college—really—who’s raking in fat stacks as a comic juggler in Philly. Things go awry when a pal ropes him into a half-assed bank robbery, during which a bystander is killed. Panicked and on the run, he heads for the first place that comes to mind: Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of one Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan (“I didn’t have a guitar, but I had balls”). There, he changes his name, falls in love with an implausibly oversexed librarian named Marion, and reinvents himself as a Renaissance Faire axe-juggler. But when the consequences of his actions follow him to his newly adopted home, Poe must rely on his loud mouth and quick wits to get out of mortal danger. Since his debut novel, Sock (2004), Jillette has generally married his whip-smart, raunchy sense of humor to hard-boiled plots, but there's less gunplay and femme fatales here than you’d expect from this sort of thing. We do learn lots of fascinating shop talk, from the nuts and bolts of juggling to “cold reading” a mark to crowd work. What remains is a very funny, oft-vulgar cautionary tale that doesn’t pull any punches, even about ol’ Bob himself. “The whole idea of genius,” Poe scoffs. “Everything is just hard work. Everything is juggling.”
A fast-talking, ball-juggling tall tale about long shots, escape attempts, and other bad decisions.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781636142388
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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
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