An authentic and poignant depiction of the complex, contradictory relationships among family members.
An aging writer in love with his neighbor traces the stories of her family back for decades.
Peter “Z” Zemeckis won the National Book Award back in 1997, but when readers meet him in 2012, he has eased his way into retirement and irrelevance. He’s about to fulfill the purpose of the little blue pill he swallowed earlier in the night when his date is interrupted by his neighbor and “unrequited love,” Nancy Chu, who asks to borrow his car to rescue her daughter, Charlotte, from a bad situation at a bar. Fascinated with tracing the history of Nancy’s family, Z rewinds to 1977 and the story of Amy, a teenage barrel-racing champion in Amarillo, Texas, whose pregnancy scare forces her to re-evaluate her priorities. “A baby fell out of thin air and she had to let go of everything to make sure she could catch it. Maybe she didn’t want to pick all that stuff back up.” Then it’s off to 1986 and Chinese immigrant Zhiyu, who painstakingly cooks a duck in preparation for dinner with his daughter, our Nancy, and her new boyfriend, Eric. In 2001, Eric and Nancy divorce and Nancy chooses her high-powered career at IBM, leaving Eric, a physics professor, to raise their 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte, alone (that is, if you don’t count the occasional help from his new girlfriend, Amy). Rogers crafts a richly textured vision of everyday life as he explores the ways the bonds of family stretch and collapse over generations. His characters struggle with questions about what it means to be a spouse, a parent, a daughter. In one of several physics metaphors, Z explains that “radioactive atoms also have ‘daughters.’ Parent atoms expend their energy in waves until eventually decaying into different elements altogether.…Why? Because. Just the way of the universe. But ask any father, and he’ll probably tell you: that’s just fine with him.” Rogers is at his best in the details, grounding characters with tidbits like Amy naming her horse Patton “after the American general. Not the actual general. The one from the movie.” The prose, funneled through Z’s narration, never drags; the bungalow where Eric and Charlotte live post-divorce is described as having “the aspect of a man who isn’t growing a beard so much as not shaving.”
An authentic and poignant depiction of the complex, contradictory relationships among family members.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781647792015
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nevada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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