An enjoyably readable and thoroughly heartwarming novel about starting over in life.
In Manley’s debut novel, a grieving woman tries to fix her life with a road trip.
Penelope Crawford is paralyzed by her grief over the loss of her charismatic husband, Travis, whose plane disappeared weeks ago. Travis had been a local hero, helping with relief efforts for victims of Hurricane Irma. Over the course of 17 years and the births of two children, they had enjoyed an idyllic marriage—then, “he got in his airplane, flew into a storm, and never came home,” as Penelope often reminds herself. “Travis died and time kept going, but I had stood still.” Now, she works at the family’s Crow’s Nest restaurant in Key Largo and tries her best to parent her teenagers, Marin and Finn, but she is never happy. Her father suggests that she help him refresh the restaurant’s menu by emailing other eateries to learn their sourcing methods. She reaches out to a Maine restauranteur named Ethan Mills, but her heart’s not really in it. When Penelope discovers the extensive rehabbing work Travis had been doing on a creepy camper he’d bought on impulse, she decides to finish the renovation and take her kids on an epic road trip—from the Keys to Oregon to New York and back—to revive her own interest in life. This well-worn road-trip plot is familiar territory, but Manley invests the story with an involving combination of humor and pathos. The author captures the awesome sights the family sees on their adventures and winningly distills them into observations that will resonate with any readers who might feel stuck in ruts themselves: “The people we meet and how they shape us—love us—were the rivers that ran through us,” Manley writes, and readers will hope Penelope’s deepening relationship with Ethan will run strong and clear.
An enjoyably readable and thoroughly heartwarming novel about starting over in life.Pub Date: May 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798989968237
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Wildflower Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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