Short, dark, stylish, sui generis. An idiosyncratic form of fiction, stimulating yet not entirely satisfying.
Palliative care, the Covid-19 epidemic, and a doctor’s complicated personal life are woven together in a sober amalgam of existence and departure.
In tone and approach, DeForest’s second novel bears close comparison with their debut, A History of Present Illness (2022), which offered a fragmented, detached insider’s look at medical training and hospital culture from an unusual perspective. This time, another unnamed female narrator is in training, learning to specialize in “pain unto death—or quality of life, as we are being trained to call it,” her work overlapping with the pandemic, aka “the plague years.” Also reminiscent of the earlier book are the narrator’s relationship with a seminarian (here her husband, Eli) and a problematic personal history, which in this case touches on unloving parents and a drug-addicted brother who has left his 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, in her care—“a temporary daughter.” There’s no plot, but the gathering glimpses of the narrator’s backstory and private life, including the death of her father, offer some connection. Loss of life is indeed the central topic, not just the look and sound of death, although these are included, but numerous other aspects: the behavior of relatives; the experience of a patient’s last hours; the fine lines between care and harm and end of life; autopsy; organ harvesting. Eli’s job is “to be with the families in those quiet rooms adjacent to the emergency department, in each wail an instance of scalding, incoherent grief.” Dying also pervades the narrator’s frequent philosophical and abstract musings, including the countervailing question arising at a retreat she attends periodically: “What is the purpose of living?” DeForest, themself a palliative care physician, has delivered less an immersive storyline, more a meditation on both life and death leavened by occasional sardonic humor.
Short, dark, stylish, sui generis. An idiosyncratic form of fiction, stimulating yet not entirely satisfying.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780316567121
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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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