Macy’s lively, acute voice can edge toward cruelty but ultimately remains good-natured.
These seven stories center around women and girls who feel a need to prove themselves despite their socio-economic advantages or disadvantages, all of which make them uncomfortable.
Class is always an issue here. While some stories concern girls striving to rise above their modest backgrounds, Macy mostly concentrates on women trying to find where they fit now that they’re among the elite. The opener, “One of Us,” sets the tone. Insecure young mother Frances has never felt quite comfortable among her privileged urban peers. Attending a dinner party with her husband in their new vacation community, Frances is desperate for acceptance. She convinces herself that the other guests’ drinking and lack of political correctness are charming until her new friends’ racism becomes too blatant to ignore. In the title story, another couple takes a vacation in Tuscany, where the wife’s insecurity as a wealthy traveler ruins her trip. In “Nude Hose” and “The Taker,” strange men disrupt smart young women’s planned trajectories, but only briefly. In “We Don’t Believe in That Crap,” two daughters knowingly watch less-than-appreciative reactions to their mother’s condescending, if well-intentioned, gestures of kindness to the less advantaged; yet the bourgeois discipline their parents have instilled in the girls proves valuable during an emergency. The collection’s penultimate story, “Residents Only,” offers a different yet complementary take on parents and children while clearly laying out the book’s themes. A woman on a trip to Acapulco with her two young daughters recognizes that the control the girls believe she maintains over their lives is a facade and that her desire to prove herself as more than just another upper-middle-class tourist is doomed even before the vacation goes disastrously wrong. In “The Little Rats,” the final story, a character comes full circle. A prep school scholarship student whose relative poverty becomes more obvious to her during a trip to France reappears 30 years later as a successful woman in true control of her life.
Macy’s lively, acute voice can edge toward cruelty but ultimately remains good-natured.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-43419-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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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