An amusing, kindhearted tale of a troubled alt-world.
In this cautionary tale, the world is made of plastic: easily broken, superficial, and unnatural.
Written in a mix of screenplay action lines and first-person narration, Guild’s debut novel concerns a group of plastic women and men, Barbie and Ken dolls in all but name, living and working under the thumb of a glitzy technodystopia. History for these figures is chiefly the epic tragedy of 50 million dead in the “big nuke war” of the last generation. What has it brought figure-kind? Someone like Erin, a sensitive young woman with a wealth of problems, who works at Tablet Town and spends most of her time moving through virtual worlds in her Smartbody, seeking solace from the pressures of a society that interacts with itself largely through phone apps and other social media. Self-consciousness is the order of the day here. Sad Erin is a voracious consumer of a television program called Nuclear Family, which at times directly parallels the action of her life, specifically the story of her well-meaning but struggling father, and features among other concerns a look at the political divide between the liberal plastic people and the conservative waffle people—who are made of, yes, carbohydrates and rubber appendages. Yet she also is inside not only a self-policing surveillance state but, seemingly, her own TV series, surrounded twice over by the unflinching glare of the camera lens. Insert into this Technicolor nightmare an eco-terrorist organization known as Sea Change, which assails civilians with guns and bombs to fight the apathy of the status quo, and you have a meta-tale of human emotion and agency gone more than awry: It’s in danger of burning off a dying planet from a once-and-for-all nuclear holocaust. Guild works the parody and pathos well in this thoughtful entertainment, expertly managing to extract concern and sympathy for the plights of these plastic characters, as human as we are despite their occasionally squeaking leg hinges.
An amusing, kindhearted tale of a troubled alt-world.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593316764
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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