A richly textured, entertaining tale of musicians struggling with their demons.
Members of a rock mega-band wrestle with drug addiction, scandals, gay sexuality, and a manipulative record label while trying not to lose their lifelong friendship in this sprawling show-biz novel.
Monroe’s yarn follows four boys who live in a nameless American town and attend St. Cecilia’s Catholic School, where they suffer savage beatings from a brutal math teacher but get mentored by kindly music instructor Sister Pat, who nurtures their talents. After high school, the quartet’s garage band, called The Sapphires, is spotted by Colin Anderson, the sharklike head of Sea Glass Records. Colin brings the musicians to New York City and shepherds them into the big time and a haphazard name change to the titular street where they grew up. The narrative follows the band members’ intertwined lives: Vince DiPaulo, the group’s leader, who chafes at Colin’s control and gets heavily into pot, LSD, and speed; sexy front man Steve Russell, whose constant womanizing strains his marriage to a Hollywood starlet; backup vocalist and songwriter Dave Corcoran, who marries Shelia Somers, not knowing that the child she is carrying is by her rapist and not him; and guitarist Kevin Bennett, a squeaky-clean but deeply closeted gay man who lives in dread that his proclivities will be discovered and ruin his career. The novel deepens these complications as the 1960s progress. The band undergoes several makeovers, moving from blue-suited doo-wop to bell-bottomed psychedelia; Vince enters a downward spiral of drug abuse that makes Colin and Steve maneuver to kick him out of the group; Dave is shaken by a family tragedy that sends him on a spiritual quest to India; and a blackmailer reveals Kevin’s secret to Colin, who has him committed to a conversion-therapy rehab unit, where he endures torturous aversion treatments.
Monroe, a former casting director, paints a complex, nuanced portrait of the entertainment industry and the personalities that inhabit it. (Colin, for example, is a domineering jerk, but his keen eye for what works in pop music underlies the band’s success.) The author’s prose is punchy, colorful, and evocative, whether he’s describing Vince’s first acid trip—“He floated about the room, and the physical contours of his body began to disappear and meld into the pigments.…Everything that was concrete and real seemed illusive and fake, and everything illusory and unseen began to take on form and shape”—or aversion therapy. (“Screaming through his clenched teeth, Kevin felt like he was being incinerated alive, as every muscle in his body constricted and the jolt of electricity pulsated through his hands and his private parts.”) But Monroe also gets at the hidden, achingly familiar psychological forces that drive his characters—even a hanger-on, as when Shelia’s mother reflects on the poverty that would be relieved if her reluctant daughter would marry Dave: “It sat like a weight in the pit of her stomach, and her body shook with the recognition of it. Images of scarcity and lack played out in her mind’s eye like the endless reels of a bad horror movie, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t silence the relentless voice of doom that echoed in her head.” As lurid as their excesses can be, the author grounds his players in motivations that feel universal.
A richly textured, entertaining tale of musicians struggling with their demons.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781633813373
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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