An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole.
A young Diné man fleeing a tragic past encounters an equally fraught present.
Six months after his younger brother Kai’s drowning death, Damien, a restaurant chef who’s still wracked by grief at that loss and the earlier unexplained disappearances of his parents, quits his job and departs on a hallucinatory journey that will transport him to an environment even more discomfiting than the one he’s desperate to escape. That setting is an impoverished seaside village where Damien is drawn into the complex dynamics of a family of three women—Ana María and her daughters Paola and Marta—who themselves are mourning the recent murder of their daughter and sibling, Carla. Damien goes to work in the family’s makeshift food service operation on the beach, and he’s soon exposed to the sisters’ suspicions that their mother was involved in both Carla’s death and the earlier disappearance of their father at sea. Paola and Marta try to enlist Damien in their plots and counterplots against their despised mother, who exerts a sort of domination over the village owing largely to her unexplained ability to replenish a fish supply decimated by overfishing. The clashes among these three women, who may be brujas, climax in the chaos of an apocalyptic hurricane that’s described in terrifying detail. Basham’s debut novel is complex and enigmatic, featuring a mythic sensibility and elements of magical realism, including the early stages of Damien’s metamorphosis into a fish and other characters’ taking on the physical characteristics of lizards and insects. The novel’s prose is lush and evocative, and there’s an almost erotic charge to Basham’s writing about food, a central element in the story. He tries to give the novel a larger thematic resonance by alluding to the tragedy of the Long Walk—the dispossession of Damien’s ancestors, some 10,000 members of the Navajo (Diné) tribe in the 1860s—as well as the impact of climate change.
An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241084
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
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