A skillful debut which serves as a reminder that a country's past can never be left in the past.
Paloma Larrea, the 21-year-old daughter of wealthy Argentinian diplomat Santiago Larrea, uncovers a life-altering family secret as she investigates her father’s past.
During a party at her parents' summer home in the Hamptons, Paloma meets Grace de Graaf (nee Díaz), a friend of her father’s from college. Grace starts to tell Paloma how Santiago saved many people in the 1970s during Argentina's military dictatorship, but he cuts her off. Intrigued by this encounter, Paloma searches for more information when she and her family travel to Argentina for Santiago's installation as ambassador to the United Nations. Alternating between Paloma’s investigation in 1998 and Santiago’s life in the years leading up to Argentina’s 1976 coup, the book is inspired by the author's interviews with the children of disappeared persons when she was a TV producer in the 1990s, highlighting human rights violations such as kidnapping, illegal adoptions, and torture. Although “a tenet of the Larrea family was appearing neutral and staying above the fray when it came to Argentina’s topsy-turvy politics,” Santiago finds himself entangled because of a political-dissident friend and socially conscious lover he tries to protect. Paloma, who was raised in New York, learns of the atrocities of the '70s when she meets Franco Bonetti, who's part of an activist group of "children of the desaparecidos or people whose parents were political prisoners or lived in exile during the dictatorship.” He helps her track down people and resources that reveal the secret her father’s been hiding. In seeking to learn more about him, Paloma unearths information that alters her own life in ways she could have never imagined.
A skillful debut which serves as a reminder that a country's past can never be left in the past.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2029-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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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