A gentle read for those who believe the minutiae of life—especially childhood—are imbued with inexplicable meaning.
A debut collection of nine meandering short stories set in Bangalore, India—a town on the cusp of transformation.
The town’s mutation into a bustling commercial hub is mirrored in the stories, and with each mushrooming multiplex (“Boomtown Girl”), new film (“Independence Day”), or ice cream store (“A Very Full Day”), characters experience change that determines their lives. Like Amrita Mahale’s Milk Teeth, Sunder’s stories are concerned with Indian liberalization, when the country’s economic and cultural landscape changed to accommodate all that once seemed foreign and unattainable. The characters share aspirations, and desire throngs the pages. Many of these stories feature youth at the edge of puberty, recognizing their own desires (“The Footbridge”) or confronting their own bodies as desirable objects (“Dragon Girl”); they also ruminate over the particularities of patriarchal control and policing of desire in small-town India. Other stories trail the movements of men (“Jungleman” and “The Western Tailor”), capturing regret, solitude, and a studied misogyny. Sunder’s style is granular and broad, and memories of Bangalore and its residents are colored by the looming shift into modernity, the whole collection striking, perhaps, an autobiographical tenor. Though these stories are well crafted, the singularity of focus and the similitude in rendering disaffected young teens and nostalgia-struck adults make the collection feel monotonous. Nevertheless, however predictable the stories may be, the author’s expressive style depicts lives cocooned in uncertainty and loneliness, novelty and longing.
A gentle read for those who believe the minutiae of life—especially childhood—are imbued with inexplicable meaning.Pub Date: April 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781625570499
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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