Some interesting ideas in search of a coherent fictional framework.
Her privileged existence shaken up by pornographic pamphlets about her, a woman looks for meaning in a time of radical change.
Coyly partial names (Antoinette, Beaumarchais, Louverture) and the general course of events indicate that Celine struggles to face down her slanderers in the years leading up to the French Revolution, falls afoul of the new government during the Reign of Terror, then wanders off to the Americas, where George Washington oppresses Native Americans, and French revolutionaries fail to live up to their ideals when faced with a slave revolt in Hispaniola. At the same time, Celine and her friends message each other and use anachronistic words like fascist. “Centuries and centuries go by, but everything happens in the present moment,” is apparently Thirlwell’s point, insofar as his all-over-the-map narrative can be said to have a point. An interlude among the Mohawks and a bizarre trip to the moon (“the calendar on the wall in the kitchen was saying that the year was now 2251”) suggest that Celine’s quest involves a desire to live in greater harmony with the natural world, and she muses about women’s lack of power and agency throughout. The uses and nature of language is another thematic undercurrent; Thirlwell definitely isn’t short on ideas. But his tone is so abstract that it’s difficult to engage with those ideas or the people voicing them. A comment by Celine’s daughter, Saratoga, on writers’ limited notions about the future is characteristically opaque: “The true future wasn’t what was about to happen in a month or even a year but the future future, said Saratoga: alien and incommunicable.” Celine’s relationships with the numerous secondary characters milling around her are equally hard to parse. The enigmatic ending is likely to frustrate anyone who hasn’t already been frustrated by a text that seems to go out of its way to be disorienting and alienating.
Some interesting ideas in search of a coherent fictional framework.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780374607616
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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