The dark humor suggests Boyle is having more fun than his characters.
A romantic triangle turns brutal in a dead-end Nevada desert town.
It all starts with the death of Terrence Tully’s mother. He’s a third-year medical resident in Los Angeles, working a brain-deadening schedule and barely aware of the world outside. He reduces the rest of humanity to symptoms and diagnoses. But the news of his mother’s death changes his life, and not for the better. He drives the four hours across the desert to deal with her affairs in Nevada. She’s left him a house. And a dog. He stops to get his bearings at a restaurant in town, where he encounters Bethany. She’s pretty, approachable, and apparently needs a place to live. He now has one, his mother’s house, though he isn’t about to open it to a stranger. But Bethany awakens something irresistibly sexual in Terry, and the house is soon all but hers. She’s recently experienced a hard breakup with Jesse, a biker with a jealous streak and impulse-control issues who teaches eighth grade. (You wouldn’t want him teaching your eighth grader.) It’s soon apparent that Bethany’s ex isn’t quite as much an ex as she’d indicated. Something’s gotta give. Something does, and then something worse. Revenge, retribution, retaliation—there are a series of attempts to balance the cosmic scales of justice. Do these characters get what they deserve? (Does anyone?) The narrative alternates among the perspective of each of these three, none of whom has much of an interior life. The plot pivots on pat coincidence, with some noirish cliché and riffing on sex and death. Each of the three characters wonders where their life is going. Though doctors tend to warn patients they’re not out of the woods, Bethany realizes that “we’re all in the woods all the time.” By the end of the novel, it’s plain that there is no possibility of redemption for these three, or even resolution.
The dark humor suggests Boyle is having more fun than his characters.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781324097525
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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