Boston readers might enjoy the close attention to city landmarks, but there’s not much else to recommend this thriller.
An eclectic cast of characters converges in a self-storage warehouse where crime lurks in every unit.
“Metropolis” is the name of a seedy self-storage facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several renters are hiding more than old furniture and paperwork. Liddy, a wealthy housewife with a violent husband, spends drug-fueled afternoons in a unit stuffed with her children's old toys. Jason, a lawyer fired from his prestigious firm and left by his wife, hangs a shingle outside his unit and practices law from a makeshift office inside. Marta, a brilliant Venezuelan graduate student whose visa has been revoked, lives in her unit while on the run from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The building’s owner, Zach, and his employee, Rose, look the other way when renters break the law by occupying units intended for inanimate objects. These arrangements might have continued peacefully were it not for a violent incident, foreshadowed on the first page, in which a man is seriously injured in the building’s elevator shaft. Through chapters narrated from the perspectives of several characters, the story of the incident—and its aftermath—unfolds slowly. Unfortunately, the characters are wooden, making it difficult to invest in their demise or salvation. The attempt to create a racially diverse cast flounders due to careless reliance on stereotypes. Black characters, including Jason, consistently curse more than White characters, both in unconvincing dialogue and in interior monologue. Marta, the undocumented immigrant, has little storyline beyond her panicked desire to stay in America. A snappy plot or spirited sentences might partially salvage the stock characters, but this novel has neither.
Boston readers might enjoy the close attention to city landmarks, but there’s not much else to recommend this thriller.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61620-958-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
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