A strong story with an engaging protagonist.
A search for her father takes a 16-year-old Parisienne on a voyage of self-discovery across two continents and two decades.
When we meet Delphine in September 1945, she tells us she has killed someone but gives no details until much later. We know right away who she thinks her father is: Ernest Hemingway, who Delphine’s mother says was her lover for two years before their baby was born in 1929 and he decamped to the U.S. Despite having dealt with her mother’s alcoholism and unreliability throughout her childhood, Delphine fiercely believes this to be true. This conviction carries her first to New York, where she takes refuge in Harlem with a nurturing Black couple who knew her mother in Paris, then later to Havana, where she has heard Hemingway is living. Her quest for Papa is the narrative line on which Lemmie hangs a touching coming-of-age tale. Delphine exhibits the classic traumatized personality of an alcoholic’s child: simultaneously guilty and angry. She assuages the guilt in New York by befriending and trying to help a drug-addicted party girl; when that blows up, she flees for Havana. There, she settles in to write the novels that will show Papa she is truly his daughter. She does eventually make contact, but the novel’s central action over the next 14 years is Delphine’s slow maturation, which includes clearer-eyed assessments of her mother, Hemingway, and even his books that she once uncritically admired. Her growth is fostered in large part by Javier, initially hired as her guide and translator but ultimately her friend and savvy mentor. Castro’s overthrow of the Batista regime paves the way for the final stage in Delphine’s odyssey. She has chronicled her struggles and insecurities so affectingly that readers are likely to be tolerant of closing chapters that too neatly wrap up a plot grounded in messy ambiguities.
A strong story with an engaging protagonist.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593185711
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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