A dark and skillful teenage crime novel with plenty of heart.
In Becker’s debut novel, a drug-dealing teen makes a series of bad decisions in 1980s Las Vegas.
As the story begins, 14-year-old Brady Wilks expects to spend his upcoming summer partying and playing Dungeons & Dragons with his next-door neighbor Mick. He also plans to engage in low-level drug dealing at the behest of Mick’s friend Alex, who supplies their neighborhood in suburban Las Vegas. Along the way, he also plans to avoid his own mother, with whom he has a difficult relationship. His summer takes a few unexpected turns, though: For one thing, he meets Cheryl, a recent high school graduate; for another, Alex decides to branch out into heroin, which had previously been part of the boys’ world only when they mourned comedian John Belushi’s recent death. Brady soon becomes infatuated with Cheryl, who thinks he’s several years older than he is, and he has little patience for Alex, whom he doesn’t trust. However, he agrees to provide backup firepower for Alex—wielding guns illicitly borrowed from a shop owned by another friend’s father—at a meetup with cartel members in the Nevada desert. Things don’t go as planned, but Brady doesn’t make a complete break from Mick’s entourage until he’s confronted with a problem that involves someone he truly cares about. He ends the summer with a new awareness of himself, his family, and the difficulty of making the right choices.
This bleak but not entirely hopeless coming-of-age novel offers plenty of elements that will keep readers engaged. The book’s 1980s setting is well developed but handled subtly, without focusing on the references to consumer culture that drive many other period pieces; the only “Tab” in the book, for instance, is Brady’s younger sister. The story exists in a fictional universe that recalls Risky Business and John Hughes movies but draws from a much darker and more nihilistic perspective: “Visible scars mean you’ve been in a fight. The invisible ones keep you in it,” Brady muses after evaluating injuries acquired during one of his many violent confrontations. Brady is a challenging protagonist, and Becker balances his flaws and his vulnerabilities well, keeping readers from giving up on him entirely, even as they watch him make one bad call after another. The narrative also offers him a redemption arc that doesn’t neatly tie up all the novel’s loose ends. Although the frequent scenes of teen drug use may be off-putting to some, they generally feel more documentary than prurient—a manifestation of how Brady and his friends try to assert their independence from adults, who are merely background characters. The prose is solid throughout, with a close first-person narrative that shows events from Brady’s perspective, and it has a straightforward tone that keeps the more dramatic scenes from turning into melodrama. Brady’s tendency to draw life lessons from D&D is endearing without feeling overdone, and it allows the book to take an introspective turn without betraying its 14-year-old perspective.
A dark and skillful teenage crime novel with plenty of heart.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Copywrite, Ink
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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