Not every character in the collection is memorable, but their fates make an impression.
Biswas offers a collection of macabre literary short stories.
This often-morbid book is rife with tales of death, loss, and murder. In the first story, “A Sea Voyage,” the captain of a ship seems to have lost his mind during a storm, and one of the crew jumps into the sea “like a lemming” for no apparent reason. It becomes clear that “these are not seasoned professionals delicately guiding the ship through changing waters.” In “Blister,” set in 19th-century Scotland, a sailor named Paul Neville is bound for Australia, only to perish during the journey; Paul’s widow, Sarah, is left with both emotional and physical damage. “Swimming in the Ocean Is Wrong” features a husband who steals a high-end bathing suit for his wife. It seems like a largely inconsequential crime—until the action moves to the beach. “Rhonda’s Story” takes readers to Corpus Christi, Texas, in the year 1892, where a man is convicted and executed for the murder of a sex worker. Years later, the man’s daughter also winds up in a violent situation and receives a harsh punishment as a result. “Richard Court: The Priest, the Sinner” describes, in a few short pages, a lengthy novel about sex work and suicide. The stories tend to be no more than a few pages long; in those pages, readers can never be quite sure what violence will befall the characters. People are dispatched in an assortment of ways, whether they’re “succumbing to an endless sleep” (“The Town That Went to Sleep”) or shot by a commanding officer (“Julie’s Murderer”). The excitement stems from seeing what trouble each tale will bring. There isn’t always a lot of depth to each character, however; both Paul and Sarah in “Blister” are fairly bland (Sarah is said to be beautiful, but there’s not much about her that makes her stand out). Still, each story compellingly puts its characters in tough spots that prove to be both gloomy and unexpected.
Not every character in the collection is memorable, but their fates make an impression.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798987625903
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Obie Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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