An excellent set of sensitively rendered portraits.
Three employees at a New York City real estate company navigate love, loss, and societal expectations in Adelman’s novel.
The narrative’s three parts each follow a different employee at Juno Real Estate in Midtown Manhattan in 1977: Max Arnold, the bookkeeper; Natalie Herris, the company’s president; and its vice president, Paul Gartner. Max came to New York in 1951 as a refugee from Poland and still feels isolated and traumatized; he’s an observant Jew, and although religion comforts him in some ways, it seems to make him feel lonelier in others. Natalie is a gentile, and Gartner is Jewish but nonreligious. Max must go to his recently deceased aunt’s house in the Bronx; he’d been avoiding the trip because her ex didn’t let him stay with them when he’d first arrived in America. He soon finds himself finally feeling the sadness and guilt he’d been suppressing for many years. Natalie’s grandfather founded Juno Real Estate; she’s president because she’s cut out for it, but also because her two cousins weren’t. She finds that she has to prove herself to men constantly and clean up mistakes that her uncle and grandfather made. Meanwhile, her husband is insecure about her success and seems uninterested in her as a person. Paul, who’s divorced, has fallen in love with fellow employee Dorie Feehan, who’s separated from, but still married to, her abusive husband. When her spouse’s shady acquaintance visits her, Paul finds himself reevaluating what matters to him. Adelman’s novel is gentle and empathetic and never shies away from the pain and suffering that its characters face. Its dialogue is its greatest strength, bringing each character to vivid life. The cab driver who brings Max to the Bronx is a particular highlight (“My idea is…to discuss John Donne as an optimist”), but the main players are all compelling in their own ways. Readers will come away wanting to spend more time with them, as the fragmented structure means that there’s only a short story’s worth of narrative for each. Hopefully, there will more about the lives of Max, Natalie, and Paul in a future volume.
An excellent set of sensitively rendered portraits.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781624622175
Page Count: 167
Publisher: bethadelmanfiction.com
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2026
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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