This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.
The search for a missing girl gives blighted lives hope for redemption in this haunting verse novel.
George’s story centers on the romance between Bad Boy—a ne’er-do-well who robs pharmacies and joyrides around the town of Hollow Rock, Tennessee—and his 15-year-old girlfriend Alison, whose grandmother has threatened to shoot him. After a season of furtive, passionate trysts, Alison dumps him for a local meth-head, which leads to violence and to Bad Boy taking Alison against her will across the Mississippi to West Memphis, Arkansas; she finally escapes him at the Flying J truck stop and is last seen jumping into the cab of a random trucker who drives off with her. The novel then shifts to the perspective of “the Chaplain,” an ex-con who stages Christian revival meetings in a tent backed by a band featuring Debbie, a former sex worker, on drums. The Chaplain’s sermons stress that no one is too sinful and low to be forgiven and saved by Jesus, a proposition that’s challenged by a sinister trucker who announces his own unforgiveable sin: killing a girl. The Chaplain and his band fall in with a female trucker who witnessed the Flying J incident, retrieved the pink sneaker Alison left on the tarmac, and has been putting up missing-persons posters with Alison’s picture wherever she goes; at one of the Chaplain’s meetings, the sinister trucker comes onto her radar as a likely suspect in Alison’s disappearance. The stories of Ruth, the trucker’s sister who recalls his disturbing childhood behavior, and the West Memphis police detective who shrugs off Alison’s disappearance but gets pulled in deeper, are also braided into the narrative.
The story unfolds in a perfectly rendered, hardscrabble South seen through the eyes of working-class people with industrial-strength vehicles navigating an archipelago of strip malls and truck plazas connected by roaring interstates and shadowy county roads. George writes in a poetic meter as supple as the most naturalistic prose; the writing is grounded in plain, earthy English but has a musicality that makes it feel like a biblical parable or a hillbilly highwayman’s ballad. (“A dustball cheapskate town and Broad / Street much the way is just two lanes, / which goes to show you what broad counts / for here—and Hollow Rock is Nowhere / Tennessee, but, like they say, / it’s home.”) The author writes about tawdry lives riddled with bad decisions, but finds a lyrical beauty in them. (“A girl like Alison you don’t / find at the Carroll County Fair. / She’s like a light you see at night / too low on the horizon and / you think you see an airplane crashing—you listen for the sound and hear / none, turn on the TV and there’s / no news, and then you wonder what / you saw and did you even see it?— / something bright and terrible, / the beauty hurts your eyes, you only / wish you’d see it once again.”) Readers will be captivated by George’s dark, hallucinatory vision and gorgeous language.
This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781604893717
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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