An admirably ambitious, if knotty, all-American saga.
Two families navigate a century of art, commerce, and estrangement.
Castleberry’s second novel opens with a would-be art heist: In 2024, Tobey Harlan, the ne’er-do-well son of a California real estate mogul, is planning to steal three paintings by Di Stiegl, an acclaimed artist who emerged in the 1980s downtown New York scene. Out of this plot spills a complex history involving the worlds of visual and fine art. Stiegl’s grandfather, Klaus von Stiegl, was a German-born film director who was in demand during the silent era; the talkies, plus a scandal or two, sidelined him until the ’60s, when he directed a TV crime drama, Brackett, starring Tobey’s grandfather. (A provocative final season, dark in the way that anticipated The Sopranos, made Klaus a critical darling and cult figure.) The novel luxuriates in epic sprawl in the mode of Jonathan Franzen, Nathan Hill, and Garth Risk Hallberg. And it’s rich in time-shifting, stylistic flourishes; interstitial sections mimic blog-speak, Hollywood trade papers, art world chatter, and more. While the varying fates of the Harlan and Stiegl clans gets convoluted, Castleberry’s message is straightforward: Wealth facilitates art but also undermines it (a studio kills Klaus’ magnum opus, Di loses years to a coke habit), and can be even more ruinous to families. Percy, Klaus’ son and Di’s father, exemplifies the wayward, money-grubbing personality that threatens to undermine the family. And Castleberry suggests that as a culture, we’re subsisting on an inheritance and nearing bankruptcy: “Did anyone actually create anything anymore? Weren’t we past all that to just pure consumption?” This novel, of course, is determined to serve as a counterweight to that idea, even if stuffed nearly to the breaking point.
An admirably ambitious, if knotty, all-American saga.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063213333
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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