Wide-ranging tales united by narrators with shared histories and questions of belonging.
Short stories examine lives shaped by the Vietnamese refugee experience.
Lam and his family fled Vietnam in April, 1975, when he was just 11 years old. While the stories in this rich, complex collection cover a wide swath of subjects, this autobiography informs his characters’ feelings, their relationships to family, friends, employers, and homelands past and present. In “This Isle Is Full of Noises,” Lam begins by describing an island in the Gulf of Thailand that features makeshift tombstones and a grief-stricken woman. Nearby, two boys obliviously look to the clouds and see “catfish in mango sauce” and “roast chicken in lemongrass and chili pepper.” Death is everywhere, but hunger is more persistent. This land is a stopover for refugees of the Vietnam War. Once in America, one of these boys, given the American name of Koala (he was born Cao Le Y-Bang), tells an overly interested professor about the death of his younger brother on their journey West. The professor is, above all, entertained. Lam’s stories are filled with moments in which characters living in the U.S. are forced to reckon with history often too painful to recall, occasionally slipping into a past they never realized they were running away from. Lam’s inventive narrative styles add to the distance his characters feel from the world around them. “October Laments” is told through social media comments, videos, and flashbacks. “Love in the Time of the Beer Bug” features a son narrating the divorce of his parents as if it’s a boxing match. The book’s final—and most emotionally impactful—story, “The Tree of Life,” uses a funeral eulogy to tell the story of a remarkable mother, wife, and humanitarian. The unnamed narrator, the deceased’s child, describes how she lived and the good that was in her heart, saying “she was always an active agent in the face of calamity”—which, Lam suggests, is levied upon all who escape home in search of a better life.
Wide-ranging tales united by narrators with shared histories and questions of belonging.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781636282428
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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