{"id":21661,"date":"2026-02-12T19:54:01","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T00:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21661"},"modified":"2026-02-13T13:36:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T18:36:32","slug":"antihero-by-gregg-hurwitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21661","title":{"rendered":"‘Antihero,’ by Gregg Hurwitz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n

Evan jostled to the fringe as the congregation surrounded Anca. Confusion pulsed in his chest, to have allowed himself to be pushed to the periphery, to lose someone he was protecting to a mob. But of course it was not a mob, it was a community, and he felt a sense of loss that his muscle memory had never been taught to distinguish between the two.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Gregg Hurwitz is,<\/strong> by his own confession, not a Christian. He\u2019s a follower of Jordan Peterson, who famously does a perpetual flirtation dance around the gospel, batting his eyes but never committing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, in his latest Orphan X novel, Antihero<\/a><\/em>, he has given us the most fully realized, sympathetic, and admirable Christian character I have encountered in fiction in this century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a New York subway car, a vulnerable young woman is attacked by a feral gang of young thugs, who drag her off, film themselves gangbanging her, and upload the video to the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sympathetic witness unloads the abduction story to a man who happens to have contact with Evan Smoak, Orphan X, the Nowhere Man, our freelance hero. Evan is able to marshal unusual resources in order to find the young woman, Anca Dumitrescu, a Romanian immigrant. The next job is to locate the perpetrators, and make sure they never do this sort of thing again. Only this time Evan is working under an extra prohibition, beyond the strict rules by which he already lives \u2013 Anca is a devout Orthodox Christian, and she insists that Evan not kill them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s not the only personal challenge Evan faces in Antihero<\/em>. His teenaged female ward, Joey, is becoming a woman, and he has no roadmap (or role model) to help him deal with that. Or with Mia, the single mother who lives in his building, with whom he can\u2019t get involved because she works for the DA and she\u2019d have to arrest him. Or Candy, the fellow assassin who\u2019s becoming a good friend and \u2013 this time out \u2013 a lover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The action is explosive and excessive, but it\u2019s the characters that killed me in this book. I cared about them deeply. They intrigued and surprised me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know when I last read a book I enjoyed as much as Antihero<\/em>. Get it. Read it. I\u2019ve run out of superlatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Cautions for sexual content and — of course — violent scenes.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evan jostled to the fringe as the congregation surrounded Anca. Confusion pulsed in his chest, to have allowed himself to be pushed to the periphery, to lose someone he was protecting to a mob. But of course it was not a mob, it was a community, and he felt a sense of loss that his … Continue reading ‘Antihero,’ by Gregg Hurwitz<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[5860,1116,2107],"class_list":["post-21661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-antihero","tag-gregg-hurwitz","tag-orphan-x"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21661"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21665,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21661\/revisions\/21665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}