Gritty yet generous slice of early-20th-century American life.
Smith’s second novel, originally published in 1948, returns to the author’s home territory, the tenements of pre-gentrified Brooklyn, with another young female protagonist trying to improve her life.
Margy Shannon’s ambitions are more modest than those found in Smith’s earlier, openly autobiographical classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. At 17, Margy has limited expectations beyond the life she’s known. Having left high school, she is relatively happy with her job as letter reader at a mail-order business. She's made friends there and has a crush on her boss, kindly Mr. Prentiss, whose genteel mother’s manipulative domination stops him from acting on his attraction to Margy—in today’s workplace, to act would be considered harassment, but the novel makes Mr. Prentiss’ mother the villain. Margy lives at home with her own dominant mother, Flo, who is too emotionally stunted to show her love for Margy. Flo’s marriage with Margy’s “shoved around” father is fueled by mutual unhappiness; yet Margy dreams of marriage and children. She is thrilled when halfheartedly asked on a date by Frankie, a messenger for a Wall Street brokerage company. The product of yet another domineering mother, Frankie wants to escape his rough family and is looking for a “sensible,” unflashy girl. He pushes Margy to marry but proves uninterested in physical intimacy, at least with her, and has no desire for children. Margy’s Protestant friend Reenie follows a livelier, if riskier, path, carrying on an open affair with her Catholic boyfriend. When she gets pregnant, he marries her despite parental concerns. Meanwhile, pregnancy leads to a crisis in Margy’s marriage, and her future takes an unexpected turn. Reading Smith today means acknowledging the shadow of homophobia hanging over Frankie and the demonization of "dominant" mothers while appreciating the multidimensional, nuanced portrayals of the working-class characters and a version of feminism that applauds both work and motherhood as valid choices.
Gritty yet generous slice of early-20th-century American life.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06298-868-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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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