The pleasures of this novel’s writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions.
When their patriarch donates the family fortune to charity, an already unhappy family is thoroughly atomized.
It doesn’t always work to write a novel driven by moral purpose. With so much enlightenment to deliver, how much fun can it be? In the case of Brooks’ debut, there’s nothing to worry about. Even the particulars of the grand gesture that sets the plot in motion reveal the book’s wry aesthetic. As the novel opens, Arthur and Yara Candlewick are confronting their son, Emil, about a little something that came in the mail—LSD and MDMA the 15-year-old purchased on the dark web. That evening, Arthur leaves their house in the Cotswolds for a walk, taking with him “his daughter’s book, his son’s drug stash, and an uncorked bottle of mid-price Bordeaux.” The book in question is an explainer on effective altruism, one which radical-minded 17-year-old Evangeline was reading at the dinner table “with the urgency of an actress searching for her own name in a bad review.” Arthur himself will read it at the bottom of a mineshaft into which he has fallen, under the influence of a mind-expanding drug cocktail. After he’s rescued, he’s a different man, determined to give away all the proceeds of the impending sale of his company and to live a life of monastic simplicity. None of the other members of the family will follow him on this path; even Evangeline finds herself annoyed and alienated by the fact that the focal point of her rebellion has “cheated and become exactly the kind of person she wanted to be, overnight, and with no effort whatsoever.” Brooks makes each of these flawed characters endearing by showing not just their pettiness and limitations but what is in their hearts. “As a teenager, Yara had always imagined that her family, when she had one, would be an inseparable band of bantering adventurers, going forth into the world together, on road trips and holidays and outings to restored castles or spangly caves. She had never expected that they would be four people conducting four entirely separate lives out of the same building, like businesses sharing space in a shopping arcade, their owners nodding to each other as they arrived early to roll up the shutters.” Impressively, Brooks finds a way to the greatest good for each of them.
The pleasures of this novel’s writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089460
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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