Technically ambitious, often trying, and ultimately rewarding.
A troubled protagonist deals with addiction and his own becoming in this expressive bildungsroman.
This novel in four parts begins in a Paris bathroom, where the titular protagonist is getting a haircut from his best friend and flinching at the sight of his own breasts. Ponyboy and Toni “grew up and over and out of Iowa, together,” discovering their true genders alongside each other. With Toni, Ponyboy feels like himself—or at least something close to the self he longs to be. But to his girlfriend, Baby—a lesbian—his masculinity is a problem that they may not be able to resolve. Everyone involved in this ménage drinks a lot of alcohol and snorts a lot of coke, and for Ponyboy, substance abuse is a conscious attempt to escape the difficulty of being himself. His use reaches a crisis point in Berlin—where the second part of the book is set—which sends him into recovery and back to his family. The narrative is interspersed with scenes from his Midwestern youth and oddments like a letter to Sigmund Freud’s patient Dora and imagined conversations with Kathy Acker. During the first parts of the novel, Duncan deploys an arduously metaphorical style that veers from the sublime to the cartoonish. “I lose my body exceptionally” is a gorgeously economical way to describe the way Ponyboy feels liberated from his physical reality while wasted. On the other hand, “My cock-intelligence smolders in my furrowed brow” is a bit hard to take. “Back arched aching in solar want. My teeth pull on the meat of an olive.” This is an excerpt from a text sent to Baby. A very long text. An unsent email message to writer and philosopher Paul Preciado is similarly overwrought. But, as Ponyboy moves toward and through rehab, Duncan chooses a plain style that allows his protagonist to emerge as real and true—and alive.
Technically ambitious, often trying, and ultimately rewarding.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781324051220
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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