A riveting new story about an abiding atrocity.
Indelible characters bring to life the drama of bitter survival in colonial Virginia, indicting a society of enslavement and dehumanization.
In this epic tale of early America, abolition is still generations away. Half a dozen disparate characters, Black and white, converge into a center in which they will have profound and often shocking effects on each other’s lives. The novel begins in 1692: open season on Africans for kidnapping for wealth extraction and forced reproduction in the brutal Virginia Colony. As the narrator observes with typical bluntness: “All slaves were vulnerable, women more than men, children more than women, little girls more than all the rest.” One of those little girls is Bless, a great character in a constellation of well-crafted people who make do with the family they’re given and long for the people they’ve lost. Bless has the curdled privilege of being a rich girl’s plaything; later, the reader will learn about outdoor labor: “Field hands had to pluck the worms and grind them beneath their bare heels.” Perry’s descriptions are cinematic, and the dialect is evocative without being grating. She makes reverent nods to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and evokes the rooted magic of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. The white men who buy humans and give orders are sometimes well established in the colonies—or like Jack Crewe, they are “the bartered class” of despised immigrants. They, too, have a price, and can’t afford to be sentimental. Perry’s intimacy with the period is palpable, and readers will gain greater knowledge of daily life under slavery, especially the monstrous glossary around the cold assessments of Black bodies. Some slavers flatter themselves: “Benjamin fancied himself a benevolent master, a caretaker to a rude and backward people.” Laws shift here and there, and we meet Black men who believe they are free. But white people, grasping to climb the next rung of the ladder, break their promises. By the end of the book, it’s an utter surprise what fate appears to unfold for the children of both striver Jack and survivor Bless, who has had to make the hardest decisions of all. Perry takes the long way home, following rich scenes with a slightly distanced narratorial explication that at first may seem redundant. Why show, then tell? It’s a congregation’s call and response. This history must be retold lash by lash, scar by scar, victory by victory, along with the reminder that systematic cruelty is codified, modeled, and taught.
A riveting new story about an abiding atrocity.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781324105978
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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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