A stirring if discursive saga of immigration and racism.
A novel about the ways crime and racism intertwine in the lives of three families.
As Worrell’s novel opens in Northern California, 2022, a racist young woman named Daria Keenan (“web-designer and regional white-pride organizer by day”) and her group of white supremacist friends have targeted Carl Graham, a 68-year-old Black muckraking journalist whose inquiries into the shady D’Bettano corporation have made him the enemy of high-powered white supremacists in California. Daria herself is a fervent disciple of former Trump aide and ex-con Steve Bannon, and her powerful aunt, Jeri-Lee, is even more closely connected with the felon-in-chief’s inner circle. “Jeri-Lee loved having power,” readers are told, “power in material wealth, power in social settings, power in politics, power in controlling the narrative.” Daria and her friends tail Graham, and they no sooner run him off the road than the setting switches to the 1960s Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. Here, readers meet an array of characters, from Det. Dan McBride, who’s investigating Paolo D’Bettano (“Many criminals are noisy about their criminality,” he thinks about the sly D’Bettano. “A rare few are truly genius at being low-profile monsters”) to Mary DeLuca and her best friend Jimmy Fain, whose father, Irish immigrant Jack Fain, is killed by mobsters for advocating against the racism of the time (“Humankind’s alarming sociopathic tendencies across all continents bewildered and disgusted Jack”).
This tremendously ambitious novel seeks to flesh out and dramatize several genealogies of racial animus. Worrell ably meets this goal by amassing a great deal of historical information and filling it with flesh and color. The book’s descriptions of mid-century Brooklyn are as evocative as anything written on the region in decades, and the frequent detours to older history effectively ground the later action and go a long way to making this author the Michener of Canarsie. This all comes with one drawback: The book’s plot lines are difficult to follow, and often disappear for whole chapters at a time since the storyline jumps back six decades to tell the life story of one character’s father, and then jumps back three decades more to tell the whole story of that character’s grandfather. This approach validates the generational arc of the book, but it can make for maddeningly distracting reading. When a character is run off the road, seemingly to his death, readers might not want to wade through 30 chapters, numerous family trees, and multiple waves of immigration to find out what happened to him. Fortunately, the characters are uniformly well drawn, from foundational social justice saints, like poor Jack Fain, to a far more complex figure, like Carl Graham. Readers equipped with lots of curiosity and a good deal of patience will find both amply rewarded in these pages, particularly in the morally devastating concluding sections, when ethical condemnations are handed out: “Too many people straddle the line, unable to keep it real and maintain what can honestly be reasoned to be sensible convictions or principals.”
A stirring if discursive saga of immigration and racism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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