A historically evocative period drama that’s poignant and disquieting.
In this novel inspired by the challenging life of the author’s grandmother, a woman is left to raise her four children alone during the 1920s.
Augusta Young is born “near the turn of the twentieth century” to a hardscrabble Arkansas farm family. At the age of 12, entering the eighth grade—the only one of her siblings allowed to remain in school this long—she is excited about receiving her diploma at the end of the term. But there is an unanticipated upheaval ahead for her. The mother of her best friend, Clara “Cookie” Church, has taken ill. Shortly after the graduation celebration, Augusta begins helping Cookie’s family, taking on the household chores Betty Church can no longer handle. When Betty dies, Augusta’s parents marry off their 13-year-old daughter to Cookie’s newly widowed father, Simon. Despite Augusta’s objections, the deal is set. Initially, Augusta finds Simon to be a caring and devoted husband. For the first time, she has store-bought clothes and ample food—until the price of cotton crashes. At 15, Augusta is pregnant and forced to move to Detroit with Simon. Poverty-stricken, they take up residence in a two-room tenement apartment. Over the next 15 years, Augusta confronts overwhelming obstacles, ultimately struggling to support her four children on a food server’s salary after Simon leaves her and the kids. The depth of her travails—and the heart of the engaging story—is revealed in Ryker’s haunting first chapter, where readers are introduced to a 20-something Augusta walking the streets of Detroit. She is hoping to get a glimpse of her fourth child, the little girl she gave up for adoption so that she could keep the other three. The bulk of the novel fills in the blanks of how she arrived at this shattering moment. Smooth-flowing prose carries the tale forward at a steady pace, although without any year markers, it is sometimes difficult to tell how much time has passed between chapters. Nonetheless, farm and city vignettes create vivid images of time, place, and economic class, and Augusta emerges as a formidable woman in the face of daunting odds.
A historically evocative period drama that’s poignant and disquieting.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781578691203
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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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