A beautifully written novel shows how small moments can make a big difference in people’s lives.
A chance meeting with an old college friend leads a novelist to revisit memories of her freshman year in the fifth novel by Monier (The Rocky Orchard, 2020, etc.).
Esmé is a novelist in her 60s who is about to give a reading of her new book when she gets a shock. Someone from her freshman year of college, a year she hated at a school she disliked in a town she despised, appears and says hello. It is Tom Killarney, a friend from that alcohol-soaked year, whom she hasn’t seen in 40 years. Esmé, who is moving in with her partner, Gino, begins to recall difficult but consequential moments from the early 1970s, when she left tiny Clarion, Pennsylvania, to attend a private college in a city seven hours away by car. An only child whose father died when she was 5, she was lonely and penniless but bright enough to become one of only 10 students accepted for a coveted English lit program at the school. Her dorm room was impressive, and the other students well dressed but lacking in intellectual curiosity: “Kids my age opened their doors to fetch their WSJs wearing pajamas that looked as if they’d be ironed, covered by plush monogrammed bathrobes, their feet toasty in sheepskin scuffs.” Disillusioned, Esmé found solace in friends like Tom, and in Monier’s novel, reconnecting with him causes her to reexamine her post-college life. A question at the heart of this novel is: What happened to the young people of her generation who were so ready to take on the world? Monier deftly spans the decades and writes incisively about how the answers aren’t always easy to find. She gives shape to fragmented and loose connections between people, however dispersed they have become, and thoughtfully explores an idea that may resonate with many members of her heroine’s generation. As Esmé puts it: “Perhaps it’s not the past that catches up with me, but rather the other way around.”
A beautifully written novel shows how small moments can make a big difference in people’s lives.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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