This unevenly engaging book about the passions and woes of writers stands out for its form.
A restless millennial editor seeks connection with a former literary starlet in this epistolary novel.
Seth Edwards is one of New York City’s many literary hopefuls: He’s an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum desperately seeking a book deal while working as an underpaid web editor. He hears whispers that one-hit-wunderkind Edna Sloane (“kinda like Harper Lee if Harper Lee had posed for photoshoots in spandex”), who vanished from the public eye four years after her 1986 debut novel, An Infinity of Traces, shoved her into the spotlight, is not only alive, but still living in the city. Eager to get in touch with a writer he admires, and convinced that securing an interview with Edna will make his career, Seth attempts to cold email his way into her life. When he finally does get her attention, she presents him with a challenge: “If you can convince me that people still care about books—novels—stories—then maybe—maybe—I’ll do the profile.” Shearn’s fourth novel is a collage of digital and analog correspondence and documents of all sorts, from Seth’s inquiries in a true-crime subreddit to an online listing for enamel pins of Edna—“We think the air of mystery adds to her glamour!” The book swings between Edna’s late-1980s Brat Pack readings and Seth’s late-2010s clickbait-content Wild West, offering a side-by-side that underlines how precarious publishing became in the intervening decades. The protagonists’ pen pal relationship is endearing, and the book provides commentary on the industry that will appeal to career book people and pleasure readers alike. Seth’s self-involved moaning is often funny and relatable, but Edna and her smartly written letters have such a glimmer to them that readers may find themselves wishing they could have spent the whole book with the “James Joyce-ette” who fled from fame and avoided Seth’s cliched proclamations of existential crisis.
This unevenly engaging book about the passions and woes of writers stands out for its form.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781636281223
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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