A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.
Eight interconnected stories set in a low-income Harlem high rise give faces, voices, and meaning to lives otherwise neglected or marginalized.
The Banneker Terrace housing complex doesn’t actually exist at present-day 129th Street and Frederick Douglass Avenue in Harlem. But the stories assembled in this captivating debut collection feel vividly and desperately authentic in chronicling diverse African American residents of Banneker poised at crossroads in their overburdened, economically constrained lives. In “The Okiedoke,” a 25-year-old man named Swan is excited about the release of his friend Boons from prison; maybe too excited given that an illegal scheme they’re hatching could endanger the fragile but peaceful life he’s established with Mimi, the mother of his child, who’s been struggling to balance waitressing at Roscoe’s restaurant with doing hair on the side. Helping her learn the hairdressing trade is Dary, the “gay dude” in apartment 12H, who, in “Camaraderie,” goes over-the-top in his obsession with a pop diva by getting too close to her for her comfort. “Ms. Dallas” may well be the collection’s most caustically observant and poignantly tender story; the title character, Verona Dallas, besides being Swan’s mother, works as a paraprofessional at the neighborhood’s middle school while working nights “at the airport doin’ security.” Her testimony focuses mostly on the exasperating dynamics of her day job and the compounding misperceptions between the White Harvard-educated English teacher to whom she’s been assigned and the unruly class he’s vainly trying to interest in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. (The keen perceptions and complex characterizations in this story may be attributed to the fact that its author works as a teacher in New York City’s public schools.) All these stories are told in the first-person voices of their protagonists and thus rely on urban Black dialect that may put off some readers at first, with the frequent colloquial use of the N-word and other idiomatic expressions. But those willing to use their ears more than their eyes to read along will find a rich, ribald, and engagingly funny vein of verbal music, as up-to-the-minute as hip-hop, but as rooted in human verities as Elizabethan dialogue. The publisher compares this book to Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. One could also invoke James Joyce’s Dubliners in the stories’ collective and multilayered evocation of place, time, and people.
A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982145-81-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
Has much in common with the author’s most beloved novels, but lacks a few degrees of warmth.
A native son returns to his upstate New York hometown, bringing along a peck of trouble.
In Pulitzer Prize–winner Russo’s latest, Nashville icon Tyler Sinclair is returning with his band, Stone Mountain, to his hometown, Stone Mountain, New York, to perform a benefit concert for an old friend, Tim Dockery, known as Doc. When the men were teens, Doc was paralyzed in an accident at the local swimming hole. A few years later, Tyler left town without a word to anyone to pursue what turned out to be a mega-successful music career. But his initial encounter with Doc goes wonky when his old friend suggests that Tyler isn’t universally beloved in his old haunts, and that some may even blame him for what happened at the Falls that day. Then things turn completely south, with the concert interrupted by news of a tragic death, followed by a fatal accident—or maybe it wasn’t an accident. Male friendship, flawed moral character, helpless and enduring romantic love, small-town police, class distinctions between neighboring rural towns—many of the elements of classic Russo are here, but a darker, faster-moving narrative than usual gives the characters less time and space to bloom in our hearts, and there are a number of plot points that don’t bear close scrutiny. In an afterword, the author mentions the novel’s origins as a TV pilot that didn’t survive the writers strike; that might account for both the pacing and the less satisfying character development. Fans would be better served by revisiting the North Bath trilogy or the ever-delightful Straight Man (1997), so full of the trademark Russo humor that’s lacking here.
Has much in common with the author’s most beloved novels, but lacks a few degrees of warmth.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9780593805107
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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