Dreamy, drifty, and droll, studded with lush botanical description and historical gems. Schine’s many fans will enjoy.
The plight of Jewish intellectuals evicted from their homes by Hitler meets the plight of Los Angeles families trapped in their homes by the pandemic.
“ ‘I do not believe in life after death,’ Mamie said. ‘I sometimes have trouble believing in life before death: it is all so improbable.’ ” With her usual bounty of witticisms and aperçus, Schine takes on the recent plague year from the perspectives of two protagonists. Mamie Künstler is a 93-year-old violinist who came to Los Angeles from Vienna in 1939 with her parents, Austrian Jews who became fixtures in the Hollywood émigré community. Eighty-some years later, Mamie lives in a bungalow in Venice with her long-time companion, Agatha, “a person of indeterminate age and indeterminate nationality whose job description was both indeterminate and, as far as Julian could tell, all-encompassing.” Julian is Mamie's grandson, age 24. When we meet him, he is lolling around New York pursuing esoteric hobbies, such as transcribing the screenplays of Kurosawa. Desperate to jump-start his life, Julian’s parents send him to the West Coast to help Mamie, who has recently fractured her wrist, and Agatha, whose driver’s license has been suspended. Not long after Julian arrives, he’s trapped by lockdown. “I’m terrified, pissed off, and bored,” he tells his grandmother. “That is a perfect description of my childhood, Julian. Uncanny.” As the relationship between the two develops, as the rhythms of quarantine take over, including the ubiquitous “jingling tray” of the cocktail hour(s), Mamie begins to share the stories of her youth, which feature well-known real people such as Otto Preminger, Arnold Schoenberg, and, most importantly, Greta Garbo. Meanwhile, Julian is awarded a pandemic romance, allowing Schine to revisit the unpleasant social rituals of 2020 and ’21 with characteristic wryness: “With the languorous timing of a stripper, Sophie detached one elastic from one ear, the other elastic from the other ear. She batted her eyelashes at him, then slowly, slowly lowered the mask as if it were a veil, an exotic veil.”
Dreamy, drifty, and droll, studded with lush botanical description and historical gems. Schine’s many fans will enjoy.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781250805904
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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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