An engrossing tale about fighting for survival and finding love.
In this novel, a teenager comes of age under the most turbulent family circumstances.
Charlie, aka Moon, is a 13-year-old boy running away from home at the beginning of Habeeb’s story. Not only is Moon fleeing his family, he is also reinventing himself with his new name. Prior to decreeing himself Moon, he was labeled a “loser, faggot, pussy, weirdo.” In choosing his own name, Moon acknowledges that “the moon and I had a lot in common: Bullied by meteors and space junk, the moon carried scars and bruises.” Moon leaves home and travels to Venice Beach in California for a plethora of reasons, including his abusive father and alcoholic mother. As Moon tries to survive on the streets, he is offered money and shelter in exchange for sex work, which he soon escapes when he lands at a shelter for adolescents. It is at the shelter that Moon meets Renata, a counselor who looks out for him and makes him feel safe and loved. But he soon begins to hang out with her son, Ben, who inadvertently introduces him to a drug dealer who solicits Moon to sell marijuana. It is only when Moon is finally able to admit to both Ben and Renata that he feels loved by them that he has the opportunity to change his life. Habeeb’s engaging novel skillfully explores the dark underbelly of growing up in an abusive household and trying to choose a new family. Moon’s early life experiences are full of trauma and pain. “When kids run away from home,” he reflects at the beginning of the book, “people try to find them and send them back. It apparently never occurs to them that kids run away for a reason, and because running away is difficult and scary that reason must be a damn good one.” The author deftly concocts an emotionally tumultuous narrative with an array of misfits and outcasts who come together out of both necessity and love. While the story can sometimes seem a bit overwhelmed by hardship and misfortune, Habeeb expertly balances Moon’s various crises with sincere connections between the main characters. Readers will root for the hero’s success and safety.
An engrossing tale about fighting for survival and finding love.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57-869061-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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