A strong premise and sharp character work make this an immensely pleasurable read.
A social media influencer is drawn into a high-stakes boxing match in Smith’s novel.
Ben leads a double life. In the real world, he’s a 26-year-old “Assistant Fish Guy” at a shop in Boulder, Colorado. Online, he’s known as Eddie Luzhin, a character he performs on an X-like social media network known as Disco Social. Performing as Eddie brings Ben an income and notoriety: He’s one of the hundred most popular accounts on a site with 700 million users. Ben dreams of using the money to escape his lowly circumstances, which include an alcoholic mother, Tammy, and the perpetual jeers of his surly co-worker, Paul. After picking a fight online with a professor, however, he becomes entangled in a nasty spat with a small anonymous account, and when the person behind the account is revealed to be a teenage girl in a wheelchair, the internet turns against Eddie. After Liam Campbell, a notorious blowhard, gives Eddie 72 hours to reveal his true identity, Ben is approached by Shane Thomas, who “selects five high-profile conflicts on social media” each year to be settled by boxing bouts at the Shanghai Lottery in Reno, Nevada. Shane offers Ben and Liam “one of the five coveted spots in this year’s contest,” with an opportunity for the victor to claim $250,000. Ben is reluctant to enter; but with his opponent threatening to release nude photos of his girlfriend, Kat, that were surreptitiously taken during a stint as a college art model, he begins a rigorous training program in Detroit to prepare him for the upcoming match.
As Ernest Cline did in Ready Player One (2011), Smith combines a killer premise with a thoughtful meditation on the dangers of being consumed by the digital world. At its heart, the book is a character study of a young man who sabotages his chances at happiness because he thinks himself undeserving of better things. He pushes Kat away because the concept of a smart, beautiful woman who loves him confuses him. Shane astutely notes that Ben seeks menial employment and hides behind a “simple-minded” digital avatar that conceals real intelligence. Smith’s grasp of the dynamics involved in managing a popular social media account is keen and precise (“Half of the professor’s audience loves him, and half hates him. That’s the perfect ratio if you want audience engagement”). The author effectively contrasts the increasingly cutthroat world of social media, in which mobs driven by “righteous indignation” hunt each other for sport, with the tactile wholesomeness of friendship and family life. What in the wrong hands might have been a depressing satire of contemporary bread-and-circuses America instead becomes a warmhearted plea for sanity. The portion of the book in which Ben trains to become a fighter, while structurally unavoidable, lacks the intense intrigue of the relational drama in the book’s first half, but Ben’s character arc (from unassertive loser to confident fighter) is expertly handled, and the climactic fight is immensely satisfying.
A strong premise and sharp character work make this an immensely pleasurable read.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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