An observant and emotionally authentic novel of homecoming.
In Wu’s novel, memories and revelations mark a woman’s trip to her native China.
Chinese-born Mei is a driven scientist who works for a pharmaceutical startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts; she’s unhappily married to an Italian American man, with whom she raises snarky, 12-year-old twins. Mei can’t say no when one of her aunts asks her to help facilitate the marriage of the family’s only male heir, Mei’s cousin Binbin, “whom we protected like an endangered panda”: “We all understood his destiny: before exhaling his last breath, [Binbin] must produce a male progeny against all odds.” To seal the deal with his betrothed, Binbin must take ownership of his late grandparents’ apartment; the hitch is that Grandpa’s death certificate is nowhere to be found, so all other potential beneficiaries must relinquish their claims to the apartment by signing waivers before a local notary. This setup takes Mei back to her hometown of Nanjing, where, through adult eyes, she reevaluates family anecdotes, her own childhood and coming of age, her beloved Grandpa and Grandma, and her “take-charge mother.” She also comes to understand how the lives of her parents, grandparents, and extended family members were shaped by Japan’s invasion of China and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937; the purges, property seizures, and reeducation camps of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong; and Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Mei’s struggle to belatedly reconcile her past life in China with her assimilation in the United States also spurs her desire to archive her grandfather’s wealth of lore, including the story that gives this novel its name. Wu’s debut novel effectively presents one woman’s compelling personal story and how it’s been shaped by history. Its characters are memorable, and Mei’s introspective narration gives the work a distinctive voice. The presentation of a revelation affecting Mei’s marriage borders on the melodramatic. However, this is offset by the striking sensory quality of Wu’s narrative throughout, as when an “odor of over-ripe fruit” sparks Mei’s “olfactory memory—a strange, illogical library,” and she describes the dialect in her father’s hometown of Suzhou as “so soft—as if every harsh sound had been muffled by cotton candy.”
An observant and emotionally authentic novel of homecoming.Pub Date: April 19, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 388
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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