This unsparing version of the modern American tragedy is more fun to read than can possibly be right.
A family of South Florida transplants has a shining moment of promise, then the hard times start rolling in.
As the book opens, C.C. Borkoski is at an engagement party being thrown by her wealthy future in-laws, the Wellmans, whose Connecticut home commands a view of Long Island Sound. She is surprised to learn that her mother has been invited—because the guest list was so “lopsided,” her fiance explains. “Your side was basically blank.” “There's a reason for that!” says C.C., shocked to learn her mother even has email, much less that she has RSVP’d that she will be attending. The remainder of this novel will explain what happened to C.C.’s family, people who live in a very different America than the Wellmans. From the engagement party, we flash back to C.C. at 12, at a Florida rest stop eating sliced orange samples. Since her family's used car lot and home in Ohio burned to the ground, they are on their way to a new life. And as it turns out, “Loxahatchee was the best life my childhood self could conceive of.” For a while. But while C.C. gets her first boyfriend and becomes a regional basketball phenom, her big sister, Lorraine, turns into someone she can’t even recognize, and let’s not even start on what happens to her parents or to C.C.’s marriage into the upper crust. The same evocative language and crackerjack storytelling Raymer displayed in her debut memoir, Lay the Favorite (2010), make her debut fiction a richly entertaining read even as the betrayals and misfortunes come raining down. The mythic level of the difficulties that confront the humans in the book are highlighted by C.C.’s job as a marketing writer at a Florida zoo full of animals in desperate straits due to changes in the environment—a homeless shelter, as she thinks of it. As Raymer’s readers, we are like the manatees in the last image of the novel, having a fine old time playing in the warm-water discharge of a power plant at sunset.
This unsparing version of the modern American tragedy is more fun to read than can possibly be right.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780812993165
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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