Heredia explores the challenges of urban adulting before it became a verb.
Two best friends from the Dominican Republic struggle to find their way in New York at the turn of the millennium.
Sal and Charo, both in their early 20s, are relative newcomers to the city. Charo arrived first, after an uncle living in the United States agreed to adopt her so she could immigrate more easily. As if repaying her debt to him and sending money to her parents back home weren’t hard enough, she’s now a mother. Her daughter’s father means well, but Charo suffocates under the weight of his expectations and those of the Bronx’s Dominican community. Moving to the U.S. was supposed to liberate her, but instead of freedom she’s got nothing but responsibility. Meanwhile, Sal can’t escape the memory of a horrific crime committed against one of his closest friends, the event that propelled him to leave Santo Domingo. As he’s navigating through his identity as a gay Latine man and the anguish of grief, he falls for a man who welcomes him and Charo into his friend group, offering them a refuge in his corner of New York’s queer community. Perhaps if they try, they can and do belong. This is pre-9/11, pre-Bloomberg New York. Members of the Dominican community still reel from past wars in their home country and the violence in their new one. People outside of New York barely know the island nation exists and are perplexed by folks like Sal and Charo, who look Black to them but speak English by way of Spanish. Marriage equality and PrEP are more than a decade away. This historical context isn’t in the book exactly, but that’s the point—Charo and Sal need to grapple with their individual and collective pasts and the uncertainty of the future. What would the 2000s hold? A good question, but like its protagonists, the book meanders. For readers looking for more of a vibe than a plot, this is a solid debut about working through the confusion of intersectional identities and trauma.
Heredia explores the challenges of urban adulting before it became a verb.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781668050460
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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