Buried under excess verbiage, there's a thoughtful novel struggling to come out.
A Black Latina lawyer represents patients at a New York psychiatric hospital while struggling with the aftereffects of her own past trauma.
Johnson’s debut opens with a bang. In the midst of consulting with a new client, Vivian calms a troubled teenager who has just slashed a nurse with a knife. Outwardly she's cool and professional, but once the incident is resolved successfully, Vivian inwardly crumbles, and we soon learn that she's saddled with deep-rooted emotional problems. Haunted by dark memories of childhood sexual abuse, she holds herself together in a state of hypervigilant awareness of possible male violence. A simple subway ride turns into a terrifying adventure in which she’s “besieged by animal fear." Vivian can only relax when she’s smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, who also survived a dysfunctional, abusive family. A dreaded family reunion in which Vivian’s worst fears are realized drives her to a dramatic decision. Will it bring the healing Vivian craves or spiral her further down into a nervous breakdown? While Johnson’s theme—how unresolved personal traumas can cripple a life—is compelling, her execution is marred by clunky prose that makes it difficult to connect with the story (“There was something about shallow clichéd lyrics combined with a sweeping sonic landscape in the sterile setting of a CVS, Duane Reade, or Walgreens that always moved her in a Don DeLillo way”). In trying to capture her protagonist’s anxious and obsessive state of mind, the author often gets bogged down in details that disrupt the narrative flow. An entire paragraph describing calorie counts as diet-obsessed Vivian agonizes over which snacks to purchase doesn’t make for compelling reading. Aside from brutally honest Jane, who calls Vivian out on her self-absorption, the other characters are barely fleshed out. And strangely, the novel hardly delves into the abuse at the core of Vivian’s troubles. Her abuser is simply called “the violent man.”
Buried under excess verbiage, there's a thoughtful novel struggling to come out.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-26423-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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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