A lack of originality torpedoes this fitfully funny romantic comedy.
A comic performer, still single in his 50s, begins a new relationship that challenges his need for space in Ross’ novel.
Randall Burns seems destined to die alone: He’s 56 years old, has never been married, and performs a one-man show entitled “The Chronic Single’s Handbook.” He frequents dodgy massage parlors to pay for sex and has erotic dreams about his stepsister, Harriet. He’s not exactly the most eligible bachelor—he once had a lucrative job as an editor for a magazine, but now he’s trying to make it as a “professional storyteller,” a career unlikely to ensure financial security anytime soon. Still, sparks fly when he meets Jackie Chin-Rosenthal, a Chinese woman raised by a Jewish stepfather. However, she’s not looking for anything romantically causal—she’s been married three times and is unreservedly looking for a fourth try. Randall wonders if he has finally met a woman he can commit to in terms that are lightsome but not terribly funny, much like the novel as a whole (“Could Jackie be the woman I’ve been waiting for? Someone who will think about me, miss me, and pick me up after a colonoscopy? Someone who is always there for me?”). In this largely formulaic comedy, Randall’s “wishy-washy waffling bullshit” wears on the reader as much as its tires Jackie. (“I hate her! I love her!…I don’t know how I feel!”) There is hardly a paragraph in the text without a witticism of some kind being attempted, and some of them are genuinely clever (the comedic hero of the novel is Jackie, who delivers more memorable one-liners than any other character). However, there is nothing fresh here—a novel about an emotionally stunted artist unable to make his peace with monogamy feels like the rehash of a hoary pop-cultural trope. This stale familiarity grows increasingly difficult to endure—despite flashes of comedic vitality, one can’t help but wish this was a short story rather than a full-length novel.
A lack of originality torpedoes this fitfully funny romantic comedy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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