Often unbearably sad, but beautifully told.
An elderly woman tells the story of her life among the Evenki people in northern China.
The novel opens with the unnamed, 90-year-old narrator explaining why she has declined to move out of her mountain dwelling with most of the rest of her family: “I won’t sleep in a room where I can’t see the stars. All my life I’ve passed the night in their company. If I see a pitch-dark ceiling when I awake from my dreams, my eyes will go blind.” The woman and her family are Evenki people—an Indigenous ethnic group living mostly in northern China and Russia—and they sustain themselves by herding reindeer and trading pelts and antlers for bullets, cloths, and cooking supplies. The narrator tells the story of her life growing up in the mountains with her tight-knit clan, including her parents, Linke and Tamara; her siblings, Lena and Luni; and her uncle Nidu the Shaman, the clan’s “Headman,” who fascinates the narrator with his connection to the spiritual world. The narrator has fond memories of her childhood, but it was far from idyllic: Death is a constant presence in the novel, claiming two of the narrator’s siblings among other family members. The Evenki are forced to deal with the Japanese invasion of China, with the men made to train with the occupying army; after the occupation ends, they have to contend with loggers chopping down the forest in which they live. The author’s writing is unsparing and poignant; she writes ably about the tragedies that mark the narrator’s life as well as her love for her family: “If I am an old tree that has lived through the wind and the rain without falling to the earth, then the children and grandchildren at my knees are branches on that tree. No matter how old I am, those branches continue to flourish.” This is an exceptionally pretty novel and a fascinating look at a people that not many U.S. readers know about.
Often unbearably sad, but beautifully told.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781571311474
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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