The novel covers well-traveled terrain with few surprises.
Over the course of a year, an affluent Jewish family implodes.
When Scott Greenspan, a cardiologist overseeing a clinical trial, starts falsifying blood samples, his intentions are more or less (rather less) innocent. He’s just lost a lot of money on an investment he kept secret from his wife, and in the meantime, he needs to make a payment on his mother’s expensive retirement home. Scott’s “whole life,” Ridker writes, “he’d been climbing a ladder to respectable living….He’d proceeded with caution, taking the slow route, secure in the knowledge that the world would reward his patience as it had rewarded his hard work and intellect.” The ease with which he can cheat comes as a revelation. Scott is caught, of course, and the repercussions of his actions, for himself and his entire family, inform Ridker’s engaging but uneven novel. In alternating chapters, Ridker visits each family member, including Scott’s wife, Deb, who has suggested that the two open their marriage; Maya, their daughter, who works an entry-level position at a prestigious publishing company; and Gideon, their son, who had planned on applying to medical school but now, in the wake of his father’s misconduct, flails about, uncertain how to proceed. Ridker clearly owes a debt to Jonathan Franzen, whose influence is plain. But each of Ridker’s points of satire—busybody suburban housewives, predatory high school teachers, the publishing industry as a whole—is too predictably on-the-nose to be funny or surprising or fresh. Sometimes the satire veers into the slapstick. At one point, for example, a housewife on one of Deb’s many volunteer committees says, “We have a protocol for this.” She goes on, “But I can’t remember what it is.” And while Scott and Gideon feel more or less like full-fledged characters, Deb and Maya most assuredly do not.
The novel covers well-traveled terrain with few surprises.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593493335
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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