Stunning and complex; a book that admits no easy answers but also refuses to avoid the hard questions.
A woman navigates the aftermath of an earlier disaster as Hurricane Sandy bears down on New York City.
Marissa is in her 20s and working as an editorial assistant for a luxury travel magazine in Manhattan. A large part of her job consists of writing adjective-heavy copy for photographs in the Top Five series, inevitably including vacation destinations whose natural splendor and isolation remind her of the “tiny, uninhabited island in the Andaman sea” off the coast of Thailand where she grew up. In the wake of her mother’s death, her grieving father moved 6-year-old Marissa from New York to the island to continue his late wife’s research on manta ray reproduction. On her first week of school in Phuket, Marissa meets Arielle, a Thai British girl who quickly becomes closer to her than anyone in her life. Weekends and holidays, Arielle and Marissa live on the island and consider themselves “creatures of the sea,” like the manta rays whose individual identities they can recognize even from a distance. When school is in session, the girls haunt the kitchens of Arielle’s parents’ hotel and enact retribution on the predatory guests who flock to Thailand “in droves knowing they can have a woman for a price.” Then, on Dec. 26, 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami hits their home, and everything changes. Seven years later, unable to live in the “ghost town” Phuket became after the tsunami, Marissa drifts through life, haunted by sorrow for what she has lost and incapable of imagining a future without the ghosts she carries within. Oscillating between the days leading up to the tsunami and the hours before Sandy hits New York in 2012, this debut novel tenderly and yet unflinchingly mines Marissa’s grief as it meditates on friendship, loss, and the shimmering beauty of memory—as ephemeral as the light that filters down through shallow ocean waters and just as enduring.
Stunning and complex; a book that admits no easy answers but also refuses to avoid the hard questions.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9798217048311
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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