Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant.
Three giants on an interstellar spacecraft are rapidly running out of room—and they just keep growing.
As unconventional as the premise of New Zealander Adam’s novel seems, the reality is far stranger. Three giants—Stanley, Alba, and Drew—are seemingly all that remain of the spacecraft Audition’s original crew of 18. They can’t be sure of this, however, as they are totally immobile, crammed into whatever spaces they could find large enough to accommodate them when, already enormous compared to “normal-sized humans” at the outset of the voyage, they grew at an exponential rate, with catastrophic results. These giant crew members, “dangerous and annoying” on Earth, were trained to operate the ship in the classroom—an open-air stadium where they were subjected to a barrage of mind control techniques that have made them docile and stripped them of any memory of their prior lives. The spacecraft Audition operates through the mysterious, almost alchemical, process of turning “[their] noise into speed and steering.” Though the goal of their mission is uncertain, Stanley, Alba, and Drew have been trained to keep up a constant stream of inane conversation to make sure the ship’s functions continue to operate, including the artificial gravity that “keeps humans small.” Why did the crew enact an apparently total “silent rebellion” against Audition itself, the consequences of which are what have Stanley, Alba, and Drew crammed up against the rafters? The novel’s three simultaneous narrators don’t know—their agency almost totally stripped from them by their physical suffering, lingering amnesia, and the need to keep up a constant stream of mind-wiping chatter—but a careful reader can begin to put together the story behind this story as snatches of the lives the giants lived “before the classroom” begin to come into focus. Stunningly inventive, this book is told in three parts that explore the simultaneity of past, present, and future as the three main characters’ voices loop and swell around each other. Though readers may find themselves challenged by this form—akin to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves meeting a 21st century version of Philip K. Dick—the rewards of a sustained read are abundant.
Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781566897310
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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