This book perplexes without provoking more meaningful engagement.
The most recent novel collaboratively written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus under the name Ascher/Straus explores a world in which identity is not only mutable, but in constant flux.
The opening image of this surreal and often baffling novel is an idyllic scene of childhood. There is a lake, children, a grandmotherly figure, and a baby experimenting with the protolanguage of infancy while he bangs his sippy cup against his highchair. The narrative voice, unattached to any of these figures, functions in a kind of a documentary-style overlay that informs the reader of their position in relation to this scene: “Always from the outside, we feel life gather….The completeness of life, but only from the outside and from a distance.” This position is the one the reader will occupy for the rest of this iconoclastic project in which narrative structure, character development, even the flow of time take a back seat to the pyrotechnics of form. After the brief lakeside prologue, the novel restarts in a diner from which a boy named Junior with no memory or sense of himself is retrieved by a bumbling henchman-type figure named Waldo Bunny, who returns him to his mother, Penny. These figures—Junior, Waldo Bunny, Penny, and various fathers, among others—reoccur, occupying different relationships to each other and themselves as the book builds a gathering sense of the sinister, the occluded, or the forgotten rather than an accumulation of chronological scenes. The result is confusing. Characters blend into each other or perform seemingly significant actions and then abruptly disappear. There is a tendency for the narrative voice to branch off into extended similes that obscure the originating object rather than illuminate through comparison. For example, when one of Junior’s father figures is home alone, he feels his house is like “a capsule orbiting and isolated in space—and inside the isolated space capsule himself, small and shriveled as the last raisin stuck to the bottom of a little two ounce raisin box that’s just been emptied into the mouth of an ailing child standing on the sidewalk and waiting to be driven to a hospital where he’ll spend years isolated in a pod with food tray and television set.” The fact that this image later turns out to provide some situational context for one of the more developed plotlines does not excuse the lengths the reader is expected to go in order to participate in the scene. While there are some moments of real insight, the book as a whole reads like an experiment in process that does not fully congeal into a project—resulting in a frustrating experience for even the most patient and open-minded of readers.
This book perplexes without provoking more meaningful engagement.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62054-049-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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