A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.
In this novel, a retired English teacher in a small Southern town struggles to accept the death of her ex-husband.
Janet Hall has moved back to Trion, Alabama, the intellectually cloistered hometown she fled to study literature. Decades ago, she married Jacob Hall, an ambitious fiction writer she’d met in high school. They eventually divorced—he wanted kids and she desired a life of independence, and Janet could no longer tolerate his serial infidelity. But 35 years later, they remain close friends, with their lives deeply enmeshed, both unable to cut the “umbilicus of passion,” a memorable coinage in Courington’s poetically nimble tale. Janet still loves Jacob and neglects to restore her maiden name, and he remains entirely dependent on her editorial oversight of his writing. Despite some success, he’s filled with remorse that he’s never published a major novel or lived up to the excited expectations of his childhood teachers. Janet is in Trion after inheriting a house from a relative. She threatens to cut off Jacob, who lives in Illinois, if he won’t join her, and then she learns he’s dead, apparently from a heart attack. But Janet begins to suspect that he killed himself—he valorized the suicide of great authors like Hemingway as an act of heroism. She becomes obsessed with discovering if she is ultimately responsible for his death, a desperate investigation poignantly portrayed by the author. Courington delicately explores the ways in which literature can emancipate or imprison those devoted to it—it can crush dreams of grandeur just as easily as it can conjure them. The author powerfully captures the impossibility of ever fully leaving one’s past behind, a lesson finally learned by Janet: “As a kid, I felt trapped here, and Jacob became my way out—the beginning of a life filled with hope and ideas, the vision of a new day. He said small towns are for the small-minded. And I agreed. But I’ve begun to realize that my world is like a worn Samsonite suitcase I carry wherever I go—scratched and dented with locks that can pop open at any time.” This is an affectingly melancholic work, laced with insights and communicated in a quietly meditative prose.
A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798989451364
Page Count: 219
Publisher: All Things That Matter Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 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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