Slithers gleefully around hot-button issues such as gender politics and racism without a whiff of didacticism.
A darkly comic contemporary fairy tale about estranged sisters who happen to have been born snakes.
The story riffs on the ancient Chinese “Legend of the White Snake,” in which a krait and a viper made a pact to be sisters forever. The krait yearned to become human, so the viper, though happy in her skin, agreed to transform too. For 800 years they practiced Taoist “self-cultivation” until they became immortal human women named Su and Emerald. “Self-cultivation? How Goop of you,” Emerald’s 21st-century best friend quips, capturing the book’s prevailing tone of satiric, campy waggishness. In the present day, Emerald ekes out a sketchy bohemian existence in Brooklyn financed by men she meets on a sugar daddy app. A millionaire for 200 years, Su lives in Singapore, married to an ambitious official in the city-state’s government. Vivid physical and sociological descriptions bring both cities to realistic as well as symbolic life. Unruly New York represents Emerald’s embrace of individualism and impetuous spontaneity, while buttoned-down Singapore parallels the value Su places on assimilation and safety. Fully realized as complicated women, the sisters share a protective love/hate relationship all female siblings will recognize. But these sisters are also snakes, and evidently green vipers are impulsive but less deadly than white kraits, which bite infrequently but are “ruthless” with more poisonous venom. The sisters’ diametrically opposed approaches to being human become clear during Su’s lethal trip to New York, followed by Emerald’s disastrous visit to Singapore. The obvious dichotomy between their views and values, coupled with reptilian amorality, set off a series of events ranging from graphically violent and deeply tragic to romantically bittersweet and deliberately, eloquently silly.
Slithers gleefully around hot-button issues such as gender politics and racism without a whiff of didacticism.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780063355064
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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
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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