A finely wrought portrait of a small-town family in distress.
In Saxsma’s novel, family members locked in private struggles flounder in denial and dissatisfaction.
Lloyd Wood, father of Toby and husband to Dawn, struggles with a failing restaurant business and is fighting the pressure to sell out and leave. Lloyd, while keeping money matters private from his family and ridiculing them to promote thriftiness, opts to maintain a brave face rather than share his financial difficulties with anyone. Dawn, feeling cut off from her husband and son (“In those walls, they were satellites, the three of them. They orbited one another but did not speak, did not interact, but passed each other, feeding information to everyone else, never to each other”) is deemed “lost” by her best friend, Kitty. After she sees a mysterious angel hovering over her farmland, Dawn becomes entangled in a religious cult and is expected to give them time and money she can’t afford. Toby resists his budding gay sexuality and attends therapeutic seminars to reverse it. In these linked stories, the author explores what can happen to the most vulnerable souls in our world and the great measures people will go to survive, make a buck, or remain covert in the face of adversity. The narrative strands are well plotted, with each story leading the way to the next perspective while still culminating in memorably climactic moments. While the characters are vividly rendered, the dialogue is sometimes excessively protracted and repetitive. Saxsma’s prose is rich in sensory detail, enriching the characterizations of the cast (Lloyd has “a stone-sour look and a sweat-stained ball cap atop his head”; Dawn’s “eyes were heavy, and her body was in ache. She smelled of the hard physical day”). The magical realism elements are used effectively and the storytelling is strong, but the heartbreaking ending leaves readers with little sense of hope—it’s hard not to want more for these characters.
A finely wrought portrait of a small-town family in distress.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 431
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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