A would-be traveler entertainingly fools others—and himself most of all—in this thoughtful novel.
A diffident man has to get lost in order to find himself in Chu’s whimsical novel.
Unremarkable Georgie quits his job as an account manager at Oats Technologies seconds after he gets fired. He plans to use his meager savings to travel the world for a year. But Georgie’s trip gets derailed before it even starts when he meets Mindy, a female monk, who robs him after lulling him into a meditative state (“Mindy was not there and neither were his bags”). He gives chase but eventually passes out, waking up at a guesthouse run by a man named Filip in the run-down Panhandle section of town. Early during his stay, Georgie posts a photo of his meal of boat noodles on his Instagram. He discovers from comments on the post that people think he’s in Thailand, so Georgie decides to continue making such deceptive posts until his replacement passport arrives and he can begin his journey for real. He soon takes on a partner in his virtual travelogue: Ant, a multimedia artist from Berlin. They develop more elaborate postings as Georgie pretends to travel through Asia, then Europe—things start to fall apart when Sad Vagabond magazine requests an interview. In Georgie, Chu has created a pitiable Everyman who is woefully unprepared for his voyage, actual or virtual, making him difficult to root for. Still, he does accidentally manage to invent an ingenious alternative form of travel, and he displays real ingenuity in keeping up the hoax for as long as he does. Travel is partly about building communities, and Georgie certainly does that with Ant, Filip, and the other temporary denizens of the guesthouse. Georgie deserves the comeuppance he receives after feeling superior for fooling so many followers, and at the satisfying conclusion, a more mature Georgie stands ready to face his future. His pilgrimage of self-discovery pays off handsomely—for himself and the reader.
A would-be traveler entertainingly fools others—and himself most of all—in this thoughtful novel.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781942436713
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Forest Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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