An imaginative if sometimes rambling collection of short stories.
Miller shares offbeat tales set in Southern California in this collection of literary short fiction.
“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” A creative writing teacher chalks this phrase onto a blackboard in the title story from Miller’s new collection, right underneath the eccentric spelling of “fiction.” The teacher—who has crossed eyes, braces, and a garbled voice—is himself slightly eccentric, as is the story and the 12 others that follow: An unusually tall high schooler attempts to ask a girl to prom while preparing for a presentation on the moons of Jupiter; in a neighborhood full of rumors of death and divorce, a father and his son learn the long, strange tale of their Vietnamese neighbor; an aspiring writer-turned-teacher experiences heart palpitations while preparing a lecture on California’s Channel Islands; an Uber driver gives a 98-year-old man a ride to the airport, where he is asked to go above and beyond the normal expectations of the job; and a motorist realizes he has the power to hear other drivers’ thoughts by staring at them via their side mirrors. Miller’s stories are, at their best, infused with wry humor, as in “The Time I Met Weaver McCracken,” in which the narrator—another of Miller’s numerous aspiring writers—travels to a conference to meet his idol: “I was going over ninety miles an hour, so I eased off the gas and turned on the cruise control. You have to take chances in life, but you have to be smart about them. Like Weaver McCracken, leaving his job as a golf journalist to write golf fiction.” The chatty narration sometimes hides a lack of plot, however, and many of the stories tend to run on without much of a sense of purpose or urgency. (The more successful pieces, like “Manfred Rutherford Junior’s Last Dance,” about the elderly Uber customer, tend to be shorter and less digressive, arranging themselves around a clearer premise or relationship.) Even so, readers will find a wealth of truthful lies to ponder here.
An imaginative if sometimes rambling collection of short stories.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2022
ISBN: 9798986335872
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Gnatcatcher Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
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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