A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets.
An overworked immigration lawyer and his religious mother work to finally face their pasts.
Haslett’s third novel is partly narrated by Peter Fischer, a New York City lawyer working for a nonprofit handling asylum cases. There, and in the rest of his life, he handles things with assurance but little joy—his lover, Cliff, has little more depth than a dating-app hookup, and he avoids conversations with his snarky and unfiltered sister, Liz. But he’s unsettled when he takes on the case of Vasel Marku, a young gay Albanian man seeking asylum over fears he’ll face homophobic persecution. Peter’s narration of his unusually deep involvement in Vasel’s case is braided around third-person narration about his mother, Ann, who leads a women-focused spiritual retreat in Vermont with her partner, Clare. Ann’s breakup with her husband (and Peter’s father) after falling for Clare disrupted her life, and it’s clear that both mother and son have been swallowing a lot of unspoken hurt. The strength of Haslett’s storytelling is its deliberation, slowly peeling back the veneers of Peter's and Ann’s professional accomplishments and cool public personas to reveal storms of guilt and fear. The two share complex queer sexual coming-of-age stories—Peter as a teenager falling for a handsome and emotionally distant classmate, Ann as a middle-aged woman falling for a woman, shipwrecking her marriage and career as a pastor. They share losses, too—Peter’s father’s death from cancer and a withheld event that gives the novel its emotional payoff. It’s “practically mandatory,” Clare observes, for women to “hide in other people’s pain,” just as men like Peter are asked to never feel it. And though the outlines of the novel suggest sentimental family-trauma fare, Haslett’s sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study.
A family-in-crisis story that keenly captures deep-seated fears and regrets.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780316574716
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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