An insightful and empathetic look at a kind of selflessness that masks cruelty and hypocrisy.
A woman beset by a series of life-altering events moves to Australia to reconnect with her daughter and meet her new granddaughter in Addams’ novel.
Judith Drainger moves from London to Adelaide, Australia, at the age of 59 following two major life changes: the death of her domineering mother, Marigold, and her divorce. It’s a big adjustment, but Judith has been known to make such leaps before—years earlier, she sent her daughter, Cassandra, to boarding school and picked up and moved to Dadaab, Kenya, to work as a volunteer English teacher. A do-gooder by nature (or so it seems), Judith decides it’s time to reconnect with Cassandra, who is now married to an Australian dentist named Andrew. Cassandra has just given birth to a daughter of her own, and Judith is convinced she needs her help. When Judith arrives, Cassandra reacts coolly to her mother’s intrusion and Judith struggles to hide her judgment of her daughter’s decisions, her weight, and her husband. The colorful cast of characters includes the busybody Martha Thompson and her philandering husband, Paul; their delinquent foster son, Billy; and the curmudgeonly, old next-door neighbor, Gladys, whom Judith also decides to help. Addams’ novel is an effective character study of Judith, whose altruism hides a sense of self-importance and a tendency toward selfishness. The dialogue is sharp and subtle—there’s a moment when Cassandra denigrates Judith’s new home (as a “horrible cottage”) that seems to suggest some deeper underlying tensions stemming from being carted off to boarding school while her mother left to work in Kenya—and Addams’ prose is capable and direct. While there are a lot of moving pieces in the novel, including Judith’s own strained relationship with her mother, the narrative strands effectively come together to convey an affecting family drama about the ways in which people overstep their boundaries, or neglect them entirely, under the veneer of saintliness.
An insightful and empathetic look at a kind of selflessness that masks cruelty and hypocrisy.Pub Date: June 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781962931175
Page Count: 266
Publisher: High Frequency Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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