This compact, delightfully eccentric story has a tendency to meander.
A doughnut shop employee makes plans for an art museum and observes the lives of cartoon mice in this quirky novella.
Former high school art teacher Chicken McNugget gets hired at the local doughnut shop. He works alongside and immediately befriends Tonya, who’s enthusiastic about his ideas: Chicken dreams up an art museum that will ostensibly showcase different artists, hiding the fact that the displayed works will be his own creations. Surprisingly, his manager, Rufus, suggests making the shop part of the museum. So, Chicken works on his art pieces as Tonya drafts bios for the nonexistent artists. Meanwhile, a family of cartoon mice unexpectedly appears in Chicken’s basement room. While some of the mice attend a comedy school, where they learn how to write jokes, others train hard in the army. Bad Rat is stirring up trouble in the mouse community, not unlike the “rude” customers whom Chicken, Tonya, and others must contend with at the doughnut shop. The author serves up a buffet of amusing morsels—for example, Chicken’s unpredictable co-worker, Smitty, who sprints into traffic to chat with a potential customer, needs a job coach by his side. Some aspects of the narrative are absurdist—the antics of the mice; Chicken forms a union that his boss and several customers join—while other parts are relatable, like an orange slushie being a handy stress reliever for Chicken. The work is inconsistent in general; it’s initially stylized as a journal (with each chapter representing a journal entry), but this approach is quickly abandoned. Characters receive only scant descriptions (Tonya is introduced as having “a streak of blue in her hair”), and a scene featuring a supposed variety of “imaginary animals” comes down to cartoon mice riding therapy dogs. Still, the novella has hints of diverting fantasy and a gratifying ending that befits its overall tone.
This compact, delightfully eccentric story has a tendency to meander.Pub Date: April 3, 2021
ISBN: 9798732583922
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
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
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