A quirky moral comedy that turns consumer guilt into an oddly tender existential confession.
Bean presents a frantic, funny novel of consumer culture, faith, and unintended consequences.
In Greenville, South Carolina, recent college graduate Sparkity Bonkins begins her adult life with a marketing job that seems harmless: helping to develop a promotional campaign for soda brand Blue Fizz. The project centers on recruiting a couple who will be willing to conceive a future brand mascot—a child whose life will effectively be shaped by advertising, even before birth. Sparkity initially treats the assignment like any entry-level task, but the implications begin to weigh upon her mind. She becomes convinced that she’s participating in shaping a person’s destiny without their consent. Her fixation intensifies after the infant, Donald Farrell, is born. Sparkity, after losing her job, tracks his life from a distance, visiting him in various institutions, monitoring his health, and attempting interventions to improve his life. Meanwhile, she drifts through underemployment, church gatherings, strained friendships, and awkward romance. Each mundane moment circles back to the same belief: that she’s “ruined somebody’s life.” The narrative stretches across years, and its tension lies not in dramatic events and external conflict but in Sparkity’s inability to properly scale her responsibility. She treats coincidence, advertising, faith, and fate as equally causal forces, and everyday interactions—selling cotton candy, attending Bible study, speaking with acquaintances—become major, moral calculations. Donald functions less as a traditional character than as a fixed point around which Sparkity’s conscience orbits, and what emerges is a comic study of literal thinking colliding with complex systems. Bean satirizes advertising by extending its logic to absurdity: If branding shapes desire, then marketers become architects of lives. The book also gently critiques spiritual reasoning, with Sparkity’s faith comforting her but also amplifying her guilt by framing accidents as intentional designs. The humor works because the emotional core remains sincere, and Sparkity’s anxiety is exaggerated but recognizable.
A quirky moral comedy that turns consumer guilt into an oddly tender existential confession.Pub Date: April 2, 2021
ISBN: 9798732197860
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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