A bittersweet exploration of family, nicely balanced between hangdog humor and plangent emotion.
A lawyer stuck in a rut receives some crotchety holiday cheer from a mysterious old couple in Florio’s charming Christmas story.
At the age of 45, with gray hairs and a spare tire growing apace, John Persepio makes a mediocre living filing wrongful termination lawsuits against superstore chain U-Sav-Plentee. But he still has a heart; on his way to court, he stops to help a shriveled old man whose ancient Chevy Impala has suffered a flat tire, weathering acerbic jibes in the process. (“Not much of a car for a lawyer,” the man notes of John’s threadbare Subaru.) The incident touches off a series of weird occurrences, including odd time distortions, a vomiting spell that scotches his closing argument in a big case, and more encounters with the old man and his equally gnomic wife in stores, parking lots, and at a Christmas party. The couple subject him to amusing but enigmatic conversations while insisting that they are on their way home (where that may be is never specified). Meanwhile, John wrestles with his fraying marriage to his perpetually aggrieved wife Linda and his distant relationships with his teenage sons Joseph and Mark, whose faces are permanently buried in their phones and video games; his warm rapport with his sweet 5-year-old daughter Macy is the brightest spot in his life. Adding to his gloom are his guilty ruminations about his parents, who died young in their 50s, and his brother Michael, who committed suicide. John’s funk is sometimes relieved and sometimes deepened by the hectic run-up to Christmas: An excursion to a Christmas tree lot for a memorably crooked tree allows him to bond with the kids, a slapstick disaster that devastates both a ham and the tree heightens tensions, and a Midnight Mass proves surprisingly soothing. But at another meeting early on Christmas Day, the old couple bring up ominous prospects confronting John: divorce, a possible brain tumor, and maybe worse.
Florio’s yarn is a richly textured portrait of a middle-class clan with sharply etched characters and a touch of magical realism, written in evocative prose that’s wryly funny but has darker undertones of uncertainty, gathering estrangement, and loss. The author has a sharp eye for family dynamics, whether in the studied boredom of adolescents (“the boys seemed to be intrigued by the sight of the trees, even though they tried to stifle any sign that perhaps they were on the verge of possibly enjoying themselves”) or the explosive antagonism between resentful spouses (“‘you had plenty of chances to tell me not to do this tonight. I asked you fifty times. You said, every single time, it’s fine. Go ahead. It’s fine’”). Through subtle observations of everyday life, Florio crafts a resonant message about the purpose of parenthood, as when John watches the kids manage the tree without him: “In a weird sort of way, it showed they’d be OK without me, without parents, with nothing other than their own motivations and aspirations and above all else each other. I felt at once relieved and fulfilled and entirely irrelevant.” By turns comic, ruminative and heartfelt, Florio’s tale captures the deep emotional currents flowing through a not-quite-typical Christmas.
A bittersweet exploration of family, nicely balanced between hangdog humor and plangent emotion.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798987944035
Page Count: 268
Publisher: PFT Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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