Inventive and emotionally observant writing.
Feingold’s collection of short stories approaches themes of childhood, illness, death, and remorse.
Sixteen tales are offered here, many of which examine family relations and Ukrainian Jewish heritage. The collection opens with the title story, which describes a vegetarian son venturing to a deli to buy his dying father a black pastrami on rye with extra mustard. The errand leads the man to reflect on his own life, marked by a stultifying sense of helplessness. “Here’s Looking at You, Syd,” one of the longer stories, is about a husband and wife who journey to Moscow to adopt a child but are confronted by a wall of Russian bureaucracy. Other stories examine coming of age; in “The Buzz Bomb,” a young boy takes playing war games too far and is met with disastrous consequences. Similarly in “The Wrong Napkin,” childish naïveté leads to an embarrassing misjudgment and a chat about the differences between men and women. In “Goth Girl,” a young aspiring writer falls for a darkly aloof poet. Stories such as “Avalanche” and “My Left Foot” celebrate familial relationships with pet dogs, whereas “America’s Test Chicken” is a tongue-in-cheek tale of the launch of “one of the hottest cooking shows on cable TV.” Things take a weirdly humorous twist in “Seventh Sense” when a dentist offers “tissue harvested from the departed” to address a patient’s gum complaint. The collection closes with “The Sugar Thief,” about an embarrassing auntie who steals sugar sachets from the diner.
Feingold’s stories are written in the first person and emotionally have the feel of autobiography. The release captured at the close of “The Black Hole Pastrami” is profoundly moving: “The black hole cracked open; light streamed out. For the first time, I forgave myself. For not saving them. For failing at the impossible.” The author is also expert at describing shifting personal perspectives; one regards the aunt who embarrasses her teenage nephew by stealing sugar differently when it’s explained that she lived through rationing during the Depression and World War II. Although Feingold’s stories can be darkly poignant, they can also make readers laugh out loud, as when the patient with the tissue graft in “Seventh Sense” announces: “I taste dead people.” The collected tales are also intriguing due to the echoes that link them. Further references to The Sixth Sense star Bruce Willis crop up in other stories, as do mentions of the black pastrami, making for delightful moments. Feingold has a pleasantly unconventional descriptive style, unusually capturing events such as sitting in the dentist’s chair: “my mouth as wide open as an angry hippopotamus, as he poked with cold pointy instruments….” However, descriptions of Russia in “Here’s Looking at You, Syd” rely on boring stereotypes, from a prosecutor that resembles Bond-movie spy Rosa Klebb to a “Beautiful Russian Doctor” suitable for “a scene in Doctor Zhivago.” Feingold clearly employs such characters for comic effect, but it results in an oversimplified portrait of Russian life. Still, this minor flaw detracts little from a textured, imaginative debut collection.
Inventive and emotionally observant writing.Pub Date: July 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798388289186
Page Count: 102
Publisher: MFT Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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