A patient, powerful analysis of the dual devotion required to heal a fractured relationship.
A deeply estranged mother and son slowly, slowly learn to reconcile.
Referred to as “the mother” and “the son,” these two people—like characters in Family Meal (2023) and Memorial (2020)—are equipped with the psychological tools needed to repair a wounded relationship but are almost entirely uncertain how to employ them. Truculent and alcoholic, he’s an English tutor in Tokyo but lately he’s been "forgetting his words." He’d moved to Japan a decade earlier partly, it seems, to escape his family in Texas, while his brother, Chris, who’d joined the Army, is now in prison. The son agonizes over his fractured relationship with his brother, another element in his perception that something is missing or incomplete in him. The son is sleeping with a man, Taku, who’s married to a woman; he’s seeking “clarity” from Taku about their relationship status. The mother and son hadn’t spoken in a number of years until he calls her one night but is unable to say much; the words he seems to want to say just do not emerge from his mouth, a physical manifestation of his emotionally stunted status. Suddenly, the mother takes two weeks off from her dental-office job in Houston, arrives in Tokyo, and promptly gets lost. It’s remarkable how delicately and finely Washington metes out the emotional journeys for both mother and son. The novel begins with the son’s embittered fury at his mother’s passivity and emotional distance, which becomes a begrudging détente, and then an eventual kindness toward her. She proves to be an adept and patient woman who finds her own way in a dizzying city, making acquaintances until her son lets her into his life. She seeks forgiveness for her past harshness, which her son initially refuses to grant. Washington imbues both mother and son with humane backstories, including the mother’s less-than-easy upbringing in Jamaica. He’s skillful at conveying the ways in which small, even tiny acts of kindness can heal: Returning home to his apartment late one night, the son notices the TV still on and his mother’s soft snoring, and he “slowly wedge[s] a pillow under the back of her neck.” In a less minutely observed novel, that would be an unremarkable moment, but it’s deeply affecting given the fine emotional calibration Washington employs.
A patient, powerful analysis of the dual devotion required to heal a fractured relationship.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780374609078
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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