This staggering gut punch of a novel shows that sometimes love looks like leaving.
In playwright Hudes’ stunning fiction debut, a mother’s letter to the daughter she left tells a profound story of love, loss, and the cost of liberation.
When her daughter Noelle’s principal reports that April Soto’s brilliant 10-year old “bludgeoned” a schoolmate, comparing her to a “runaway freight train” and mandating anger management for both mother and child, fiery rage breaks through April’s years of effortful containment. That night, she runs. Though it ignited her ire to admit it, April’s violence and her need to flee were generations in the making. She “loathed having a cause and effect, being a single-source tragedy,” but the “white hot” rage of the title—her “escape hatch” and her “battery pack”—was triggered at age 5. After that, April’s memories had been rife with “skin I yanked, bone I smashed, hair I ripped in stripy bouquets.” That incandescent veil shredded her peers’ gendered expectations: “Young buls thinking they had a monopoly on rage till they saw me buy Boardwalk and put up a hotel.” Forming the bulk of the novel, April relates these events in a book-length letter from mother to daughter to be read on Noelle’s 18th birthday. By then April had been gone for eight years. When she left, April had been a 26-year-old former teen mother, a golden child turned dropout raising a gifted young girl in a house she shared with her mother and abuela. Chronicling where April went next and why, the letter is an emotionally raw explanation, not an excuse. April is ruthlessly honest, divulging family secrets and breaking a cycle of shame and sweeping things under the carpet. In blunt yet vibrantly lyrical prose, Hudes reveals the good, the bad, and the profane from April’s brutally candid perspective—including how April left Noelle without notice or plan with her abuela and great-grandmother first for 10 disastrous days and then returned briefly only to leave her for good in the care of a father and stepmother she had never known to save them both. It’s a profound journey of the soul.
This staggering gut punch of a novel shows that sometimes love looks like leaving.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593732335
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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