A comedy of errors that gets it just right.
A young woman comes into her own amid the chaos of the literary workplace and the mysteries of the LSAT.
Coll enthusiasts will remember sweet Clemi, a clerk in the Washington, D.C., bookstore that’s the setting for Bookish People (2022). The daughter of a powerful literary agent and a famous alcoholic poet whom she met for the first time in that earlier book, 26-year-old Clemi is still trying to figure out her future, having left the bookstore and taken a job at an organization that’s had to change its name to “WLNP: Washington Literary Nonprofit” due to scandals in its past. Her first week at work is so unsettling—her boss disappears; the office is ransacked; a huge cat shows up; the annual prize banquet is days away and the caterer has not been paid, because, uh-oh, the organization’s bank accounts have just been emptied—that she stops by the bookstore to pick up a study guide for the LSAT. A logical reasoning question about clowns spirals into a classic Coll subplot, with clowns turning up around every corner. Like Bookish People, the novel sparkles with kooky details plucked from literary culture. Coll’s naming of characters and titling of their books is a schtick that never gets old, nor does a gleeful running joke about a man who looks exactly like Malcolm Gladwell. Will there be a lost car-key subplot? Of course there will. At the heart of the hijinks is dear, self-effacing Clemi, who keeps getting mistaken for somebody’s nanny, most currently the 8-year-old genius son of this year’s prizewinner. Though the boy is notorious for having caused $52,000 worth of damage at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, he will prove to be another example of Coll’s ability to find redemptive qualities in even the most obnoxious characters—a key gift for this chronicler of the egomania, foolishness, and undimmed aspirations of the modern literati.
A comedy of errors that gets it just right.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781400346653
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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