Like her characters, Ólafsdóttir’s novel is emotionally chilly while intellectually passionate.
An Icelandic midwife, from a long line of midwives, tries to decipher the meaning of the unpublished manuscripts her beloved great-aunt and mentor left in her care before dying.
The week before Christmas, Iceland braces for a storm of frightening proportions. Alone in the apartment she inherited from grandaunt Fífa, Dýja takes phone calls from her meteorologist sister about the increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change, strikes up a limited but potentially flirtatious relationship with an Australian tourist renting the apartment upstairs, and fixes up Fífa’s run-down flat with the help of a younger midwife. But rudimentary plot aside, the real focus of the book is on Dýja’s ruminations about her own and Fífa’s belief systems about life and death. Tellingly, Dýja, who gave up theology for midwifery, reveals that midwife means “mother of light” in Icelandic, and it's considered "the most beautiful word in our language"; in rather obvious contrast, her parents run a funeral home. Childless women devoted to delivering other women’s babies, Dýja and Fífa see themselves and the world around them with concrete, spare objectivity that readers may find either refreshing or off-putting. Emotions are not discussed and only rarely acknowledged. Instead, this slim novel packs in a lot of factual information, from the sex life of bonobos to the worldwide death rate of women in childbirth—830 a day! Midwifery is the subject but also the metaphor, as is Iceland itself, a nation where people value light since it’s in short supply. Dýja struggles to decide if Fífa’s three manuscripts, shared in snippets, are drafts covering a main theme from different angles or separate entities. Certainly, Fífa seems ahead of her time as she rails against man’s effect on Earth’s survival in the 20th century. Although sexual relationships are mentioned, how they fit into each woman’s life remains mysterious. Both women emphasize the noun man throughout, and it is pointedly vague whether Fífa includes women when she voices her belief that man is inferior to other animals.
Like her characters, Ólafsdóttir’s novel is emotionally chilly while intellectually passionate.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6016-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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