If this story held any promise as a screenplay, it did not translate to this novelization.
In Riddle’s novel, adapted from his own screenplay, a group of free-spirited friends struggles with careers and relationship choices in Los Angeles.
Thirty-one-year-old Robert Oreo runs Nordstrom’s fragrance counter at The Grove shopping mall. Classy, charming, and invariably upbeat, Robert cruises through life without much concern: “Sometimes I kiss girls, sometimes I kiss guys, and sometimes I kiss a lot of both.” Robert is forced to confront the darker side of life when his favorite client’s grandson unexpectedly dies. Robert finds himself spending more and more time with wealthy, grieving socialite Margaret, much to the dismay of his young lover, Michael, who keeps waiting for Robert to commit to a relationship. The relationships between the characters resemble quick sketches, making it hard to see where the story is going. Halfway through the book, without warning, the narrative seems to give up on Robert as its protagonist and instead begins to follow the lives of his coworkers and friends. These chapters alternate between Byron, who finds unexpected success in the adult film industry; Greta, whose previous heartbreak makes her too suspicious to enter a new relationship; and Miranda, a transgender bookstore employee who receives a sudden career opportunity. While the ups and downs of Robert and his entourage are engaging and occasionally hilarious (in one of the scenes, Byron is offered a job as a model for a new sex toy), the characters themselves remain flat, their motivations rarely clear or consistent. Robert’s peculiar, intense relationship with Margaret has the most dramatic promise, but it fizzles out without revealing anything about Robert’s more complex emotional mechanisms or connecting back to his professional life. Readers hoping to be transported by the setting or the romance will find the prose uneven and so overrun with italics and exclamation points that the text begins to resemble the ramblings of a hyperactive child (“He took the liberty and placed [the hat] on Robert’s head, and sure enough, it was the perfect fit!”).
If this story held any promise as a screenplay, it did not translate to this novelization.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798393865078
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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