An impressive set of stories from a skilled observer of the human animal.
Men and women struggle to find the good in the bad in Davidson’s fiction collection.
Life can get serious fast. In the first story in Davidson’s newest collection, a man grapples with his ex-wife’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. His daughter wants him to let the woman move in with him, something he is loath to do—but when his ex-wife is found beaten and possibly raped in a city park, the stakes become significantly higher. In another story, a college campus budget analyst gets into an argument with a foreign photographer taking pictures of him on campus. The man turns out to be a visiting artist, and he wants to make the analyst the subject of his next project. The photographer compares himself to Kafka: “He was the poet of the bureaucracy. What he did in his fiction, I try to do with my lens. That is why I came to America.” A third tale follows a boy on a fishing trip with his father attempting to reciprocate the patriarch’s gruff efforts at bonding, stymied by a roiling resentment he feels about his parents’ recent divorce. Across six stories and one novella, Davidson follows characters learning to live in a world not as they want it to be, but as it is. Nowhere is this tension as apparent as in the title novella, in which a Buddhist monk quits his monastery after seven years and moves in with his surf bum brother. “You’re stepping back into the material world—lust, lies, and corruption!” the brother encourages him. “Only one way to do it. Jump in with both feet!” As the former monk grapples with the crises that led him into—and then away from—the monastery, he gleans an entirely different sort of wisdom from his far-from-enlightened brother. Davidson’s prose is by turns clever and soulful, capturing his characters at their most curmudgeonly before dragging them, often against their will, toward greater vulnerability. Though the novella is the strongest entry, there’s not a bad one here.
An impressive set of stories from a skilled observer of the human animal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781960329486
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cornerstone Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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