An effectively disturbing tale that will transport readers to a dark time in American history.
A troubled Vietnam veteran wrestles with his past in Laudrigan’s second fictionalized memoir.
Titch, who shares a name with the author, loves bacon, Scotch, and the 1945 John Steinbeck novel Cannery Row. He grew up in an abusive home and became a “youth scarred with hate and anger.” While serving the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, he cultivated a talent for violence. Afterward, the Army asked him to remain enlisted, but he refused because he felt that there were no worthy wars to fight. Instead, Titch placed large sums of inherited money in various bank accounts, including one offshore. He planned to become a killer for hire, using major city newspapers to communicate with clients. But now, after taking his final leave of the Monterey, California, Army base, Titch notices someone following him as he heads for his warehouse apartment. Later, a lethal confrontation with men claiming to be FBI agents sends him fleeing to a hideout that he once knew as a teen in the mountains of New Mexico. In his subterranean mountain lair, Titch takes stock of his difficult life through journal writing. He poses as an archaeologist when touring New Mexico and uses his soldierly knowledge to prepare for the worst in his compound. Laudrigan’s harrowing two-part saga unfurls at a meticulous, sinister pace. The tension of jungle warfare bleeds into the prose, resulting in blunt but poetic depictions. Of one friend, for example, Titch writes that he could see that “the lights of sanity...were slowly dimming.” The main character admits to a “tendency to drift” in the narrative, and, indeed, readers may need to find patience with its copious flashbacks and occasionally overstuffed sentences (“Outwardly surprised, not expecting this change in routine venue, the lead trainer nodded nonplussed”). There’s also hardly any dialogue; instead, readers will find long reams of exposition reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s Gothic style. Ultimately, though, Laudrigan delivers a chilling period piece that successfully encapsulates the frustration, trauma, and paranoia of the Vietnam era.
An effectively disturbing tale that will transport readers to a dark time in American history.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66291-840-7
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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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