Smart, dynamic writing that brings a very specific 1980s subculture to life.
In Lane’s historical novel, a college student stumbles his way through the alternative music scene of Flint, Michigan, in the 1980s.
Phil McCormick declares to readers early on that he’s usually doing one of four things: attending his creative writing class at the University of Michigan-Flint, helping his roommate organize punk rock shows, managing a small pizza counter, or selling recreational drugs (or “candy” as he lovingly calls them). Phil also dwells in gritty venues on Flint’s East Side, such as the El Oasis or the Rusty Nail, where club kids and skate punks gravitate to him: “The party must continue to rage despite Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics,” he explains. Phil spends most of his time with Joe, his charming, popular roommate; Stuart, who goes on such intense benders that Phil often has to carry him back to his dysfunctional family’s home; or Karen, a sharp-tongued marketing major who compulsively steals. Karen is the object of Phil’s affection, but she never seems interested in pursuing a romance with him. As the crew shuffles between dance floors, bathroom drug deals, and greasy diners, Lane creates an episodic, slice-of-life story about youth, rebellion, and an increasingly desolate city on the cusp of economic meltdown. The story of a recently departed friend named Nigel, who managed to escape Flint for Washington, D.C., before ceasing contact with his former posse, provides a loose narrative backbone, but it never builds to anything too surprising or important. The focus is on Phil’s wry, personable, and fascinating point of view regarding this time and place (“It might appear that Flint is composed of different levels of danger on account of the homicides,” Phil says, “but this is something very few of us who are actually from here ever really consider”). All of Lane’s characters feel disaffected and cynical, recalling the fiction of Bret Easton Ellis, but Phil’s charm allows the author to build a world that’s both subversive and inviting. There’s something hopeful and familiar here as his characters head for certain doom—probably because they’re having so much fun.
Smart, dynamic writing that brings a very specific 1980s subculture to life.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798218377700
Page Count: 254
Publisher: In Love with Plaid Press
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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