Thought-provoking, textured, and touching.
Probst’s novel charts the complicated life of a woman across the decades.
Arden Rice and fellow schoolteacher Robert travel through Europe to Istanbul by train in 1977. Arden is 24 years old and thinks her “own story is the only one that matters.” (It’s a mantra that continues throughout her life.) Budget-obsessed Robert bores her; she takes on other lovers abroad and upon her return to New York. When she discovers she’s pregnant and that Robert is the father, she convinces Jonah, her current squeeze, that he is the responsible party, and they marry. But when money gets tight (she discovers that Jonah stashes unpaid bills under their bed), an angry Arden upends the marriage and breaks her husband’s heart by telling him he’s not the biological father of their daughter Leigh. Husband number two is older and wealthy—that marriage is also short-lived due to the damage Arden inflicts. Her third husband, however, is a keeper, and for over 20 years and he and Arden live in “a ridiculously oversized apartment on Riverside Drive.” The morning of her 60th birthday, Arden assumes she will be feted by her husband, daughter, and 10-year-old grandchild. Arden feels she survived six decades through a combination of luck, agility, and bullishness— “keeping her eyes straight ahead, ignoring the debris.” But her good fortune runs out that day, leaving her with much soul-searching to do. If the devil is in the details, Probst is diabolically good: As a teacher in the 1970s, Arden hands out “freshly-mimeographed copies of the syllabus,” and as a young mom, she has “a cassette player on the counter made of child-friendly red and yellow plastic.” Characters are richly drawn, exotic locations are artfully described, and the language is fresh and sometimes poetic. The narrative may have worked better had it followed a more linear path, but the story still offers much to chew over, including explorations of the role of motherhood, the need for forgiveness, and the power of memory.
Thought-provoking, textured, and touching.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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