An average joe's free-spirited, madcap romp through the last days of American empire.
After a near miss with a vicious Las Vegas gangster leads to good fortune, a truck driver abandons his fate to chance.
Jillette is one of our weirder national treasures, having graduated from MTV–era oddball to perpetual residency in Vegas, but he’s also written delightful mongrels like his 2004 comic noir Sock. Here, the writer turns to that which he knows, specifically the bizarro fishbowl that is Sin City, the weird science of percentages, and games of chance. Our unironic hero is Bobby Ingersoll, a nobody who makes his living driving strip club ads up and down the Strip. Bobby might have remained a nobody if his pops hadn’t gotten in deep with gangster Fraser Ruphart to the tune of $2.5 million and some change. After accidentally ripping off some gangbangers during a botched robbery, Bobby drops it all on a roll of the dice and suddenly finds himself a multimillionaire with an epiphany: “The Dice now owned Bobby. He owed his life to Chance. He had a superpower under our yellow sun. Bobby knew and accepted that life was Random. Bobby was enlightened. Siddhartha was dead. Bobby was Buddha.” Rolling the dice to make all of life’s extraneous decisions gives Bobby some much-needed joy but also inevitably gets him into trouble. Not that he doesn’t have a lot of fun first, although whether it’s to readers’ amusement or dismay may depend on their personal appetites for vice and folly. Among other misadventures, all punctuated by Jillette’s sardonic cultural asides and math lessons, Bobby gets a full-body tattoo, learns a few lessons in sexual fluidity, romances a gold-digging grifter, and buys a private detective agency so he can become a wealthy crime fighter. You know, like Batman. But even Batman probably didn’t count on a client whose case is rattling the cage of a dangerous casino heist crew, the unlikely return of Ruphart, and a showdown at the Trump International Hotel.
An average joe's free-spirited, madcap romp through the last days of American empire.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63614-071-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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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