Eco-fiction whose environmentalist message is somewhat stronger than its storytelling.
Viola’s novel examines the effect of environmental issues on communities and interpersonal relationships.
West York, Kentucky, is a financially struggling town, near the Illinois and Indiana borders, that was the site of a deadly underground coal mine collapse in 1994. Afterward, the mineral rights were sold to a strip-mining company that contaminated the air and groundwater, leading to a local cancer surge. In 2014, Ecological Resources, an energy company, comes to town to exploit the New Albany Shale Basin, which covers “perhaps one of the largest gas reserves known to science.” They offer lucrative jobs on a large, odorous, disruptive fracking project on the banks of the Ohio River. Lionel Boone, the only miner to survive the mine collapse, also lost his wife due to the effects of strip mining, and he becomes concerned about history repeating itself. He contacts Earth First!, a radical eco-defense group, hoping that they can find out what’s going on with the project. Thirty-one-year-old Eris Carroll, an Earth First! volunteer who dropped out of the University of North Carolina, travels to West York, and over the course of three months, she helps Boone and other concerned townspeople understand the fracking process and raise resistance. They come up against the mayor, the sheriff, and others who see fracking as key to the economic revival of the area. Although Eris’ time in West York is cut short due to family concerns, the friendship that develops between her and Boone helps them to reconnect with others. Another storyline follows lifelong West York resident Cass Estill Taylor, whose trauma propels her into action beyond civil disobedience. Small-town intrigue and gossip propels a good deal of the action of the story. The book includes extensive, informative descriptions and explanations of fracking (“Engineers used tons of water, sand, and chemicals to force ‘fluid’ through miles of piping to fracture what were once impenetrable shale basins that impeded access to large pockets of natural gas”). While the novel also importantly spends time addressing the political sway that Big Energy has over the interests of individual people, all this exposition has the effect of somewhat overshadowing the interpersonal relationships at the novel’s center.
Eco-fiction whose environmentalist message is somewhat stronger than its storytelling.Pub Date: June 9, 2022
ISBN: 9781684339600
Page Count: 223
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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