A straightforward voice guides a complex exploration of upheaval—political, maternal, and familial.
A Chilean woman loses her mother, gives birth to a daughter, and attempts to understand the fragile threads that bind generations in this slim yet sturdy novel.
Laura, an art history professor, lives a comfortable life in 21st-century Santiago with her partner, Felipe, and their newborn, Antonia, but Laura’s late mother, Esther, was a communist who fought against a repressive government and took her then-adolescent daughter to visit Cuba. Now Laura, who is clearly experiencing some postpartum depression, alternately ruminates on her faults as a mother and her dislike of her new role: “Motherhood hit me blindside,” she says. She makes some halfhearted attempts at going out with single friends but finds she’s more interested in thinking about Esther than she is in smoking weed or sleeping with a woman named Daniela. Her memories of her family’s time in Europe (her mostly absent father, Michel, is French) and of her longtime friend Blanca’s kind, bourgeois parents swirl around the void Laura feels from her own mother, whose revolutionary dreams were subsumed by parenting and teaching. “My mother could never wrap her head around the idea of working less,” says Laura, at once proud and ashamed of herself for reducing her own course load. When Esther grew ill from cancer, she told Laura bluntly, “You have a house, and you have your things, and you’re going to be fine, don’t cry.” Toward the end of the novel, Laura asks the visiting Michel for directions to Esther’s childhood home. When she and Felipe and Antonia make the trip, Laura has a realization that may or may not make things better for her little family. What remains true are her therapist’s words about relationships, that they’re “full of cracks…pieced back together over and over again.”
A straightforward voice guides a complex exploration of upheaval—political, maternal, and familial.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781642861594
Page Count: 118
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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