Contemplative and charged; a thought-inducing thriller.
Selgin presents a literary novel about the dark side of sibling rivalry.
When Stewart Detweiler, author and former instructor at the Metropolitan Writing Institute, arrives at a lake house in Georgia, the situation is bleak. Stewart’s twin brother, Gregory, has taken his own life. Does Stewart notify the police? Nope. He dumps the body in the lake and assumes his brother’s identity. While Stewart was scraping together a living at a tenement apartment in the Bronx, his twin enjoyed fame and fortune. Gregory was once a mild-mannered professor in Vermont, but that all changed. A chance encounter on an airplane inspired him to enter the self-help market with a book called Coffee, Black. The premise of Coffee, Black boils down to this: One is free to make changes in one’s own life. The book, published under Gregory’s new persona, “Brock Jones, Ph.D.,” became a runaway bestseller. Gregory became a changed man. This is all much to the chagrin of Stewart, who, though having a few published works under his belt, could never dream of the kind of success of Coffee, Black. If the basis of Brock’s message was that we can be whomever we want to be, why can’t his brother take the place of someone people adore? It seems like a good plan, yet Stewart learns that being Brock isn’t as carefree as he imagined. To add to the drama, this very text, the reader is told, has been hastily written on a series of composition pads.
The premise of a twin’s assuming the identity of his more successful brother sounds comedic. In execution, however, the story takes a more sinister tack. If, for instance, Stewart is going to successfully put his brother’s body at the bottom of the lake, he is going to have to stab it several times so it does not float to the surface. As Stewart points out, his brother is already dead. But does that make it OK? Back at the lake house, Stewart considers an obsession of his father (who was also a professor and also died by suicide) with twins and doppelgängers. Then, to complicate matters, it seems the lake is being dragged for a body. Never mind strange text messages Stewart receives on his brother’s old phone. This all culminates in an atmosphere that is thoughtful, tense, and fascinatingly morbid. By contrast, flashbacks to Stewart’s life are tame. The reader gets more than a few rehashes of what Stewart taught his writing students (e.g., how to write a pitch paragraph) and a clunky disagreement Stewart had with a barista concerning decaf espresso. Such recollections do not exactly leap from the page. Nor do they add much to this clearly troubled protagonist. After all, the reader knows well there is at least one body at the bottom of the lake.
Contemplative and charged; a thought-inducing thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947175-43-3
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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