An imaginative and tender novel about assisted suicide.
In Castano’s literary novel, a woman intending to end her life spends a few days in a mostly abandoned shore town.
Wildwood, New Jersey no longer exists…at least, not as it once it did. Destroyed by a hurricane in 2029, it was rebuilt, only to be knocked down for good by a second storm in 2030. When 22-year-old Maya Valencia disembarks at the Wildwood bus terminal in the winter of 2035, she finds something akin to a ghost town: “Only every fourth or fifth streetlamp worked, if barely. No ambient glimmer from front porches or second-floor residences. Boards nailed over most windows. Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, bashed and looted.” She takes a room at the Sea Gull Motel, and the next morning she visits the town’s infamous Elea Clinic, known for its assisted suicide procedures. Maya suffers from multiple sclerosis, and though she hates the thought of leaving her younger sister, Celeste, alone to fend for herself, she knows Celeste will be saddled with her medical bills if she allows the disease to progress. The catch: The law requires the patient to spend four nights in New Jersey before undergoing the procedure. As Maya rides out her final days at the Sea Gull, she encounters a number of people in similar situations, including Glenn Haversham, a middle-aged failed “businessman” with a history of aggrieved partners and cheated clients trailing behind him. Glenn’s looming suicide seems like it might be an act of sheer exhaustion, but he and Maya find common ground. In this ghost town filled with soon-to-be ghosts, the normal routines of life are pulled away just enough to perhaps allow Maya to find something worth living for. Castano’s Wildwood is a truly imaginative netherworld, complete with a Death District where people can settle their affairs. Glenn encounters the former Dollar General, now “‘Parentalia Advisors—Conclusionary Consultants’,” offering “‘Wills-Insurance Advisement-Asset Transfers-Estate Planning-Tax Guidance.’ An all-you-can-eat-buffet of administrative chores.” Short but richly drawn, this is a beautiful rumination on all the things, good and bad, we leave behind.
An imaginative and tender novel about assisted suicide.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988023432
Page Count: 200
Publisher: New Meridian Arts
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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