A clever, often funny anti-romance novel set in the world of platforms, launches, engagements, and turmeric lattes.
A brilliant coder marries her high school crush and creates an app that accidentally turns him into the millennial messiah.
After high school, Asha Ray blossomed. "I stepped into my brain like I was putting on a really great pair of sneakers for the first time....I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder." She's working at a high-powered Cambridge AI lab when she attends the funeral of a high school teacher back on Long Island. There, she runs into the beautiful, long-lost Cyrus, who now creates alternative rituals based on all the spiritual traditions of the Earth. Two months later they are married, and she's left her lab to found a startup with her new husband and his wealthy best friend, Jules. WAI (We Are Infinite), the app Asha writes, leverages Cyrus' alternative-ritual concept into a social media platform. Though the lawyers they consult about incorporation suggest that the couple get a postnup, two years later Asha remains on cloud nine. "I'm going to write a marriage guide," she thinks. "I'll call it The Startup Wife: How To Succeed in Business and Marriage at the Same Time." But as WAI scales the heights of venture capital and turns into an international obsession—users have shared 800,000 cat baptisms alone—with Cyrus as its face, any good feminist might predict a darker outcome for this story. Anam's fourth novel is very good on all the tech and millennial accoutrements, with imaginary apps for everything from consensual sex to anal hygiene and no scene complete without a glass of raspberry shrub or rosemary water. Nits: The outcome is overly signaled; feminism plays an odd role somewhere between liberation ideology and buzzkill; the front end of the pandemic crashing into the back end of the book seems unnecessary.
A clever, often funny anti-romance novel set in the world of platforms, launches, engagements, and turmeric lattes.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982156-18-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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