A fascinating and sexy heroine sets this romance novel with a difference alight.
In Texier’s novel, a woman seeks love, romance, and a connection to her former self in the world of dating apps.
Eve is a 62-year-old French woman living in New York. Long divorced from David, her ex-husband and the father of her two daughters, Eve finds herself dipping her toe into online dating. She matches with younger men, receiving many messages until one from Jonah, aged 37, stops her in her tracks. Eve and Jonah embark on an uneven love affair that oscillates between being adoring and distant, with questions about age, careers, and maturity roiling at its center. Readers are often hard-pressed to find unapologetic, fulfilled, mature female leads in fiction; Eve, as a character, is a refreshing antidote to the all-too-frequent erasure of older women in the media, one who delights in sex, friendship, and travel. Texier does not make her too self-assured; Eve is confident, but she still suffers the pitfalls of modern dating and an uncertainty that often calls into question her marriage to David and her other serious, long-since-ended relationship with a man named Vadik. Eve declares passionately, with great resonance, “I didn’t aspire at all to a life without desire. Wouldn’t life be dreary without us putting a spell on each other?” While Texier’s message is welcome, the novel’s vignettelike approach to storytelling occasionally feels a little too much like a stream-of-consciousness ramble—not quite the voyage of discovery the narrative was perhaps intended to be. The men in Eve’s life often loom like shadows despite her independence, which makes the ending of the story feel not as convincing as readers might hope. Still, the meandering narrative reminds readers, quite bracingly, that women above the age of 50 are not fading into the twilight of their lives—they’re still discovering themselves.
A fascinating and sexy heroine sets this romance novel with a difference alight.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9798988282914
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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