An inventive and deeply felt coming-of-age novel following two siblings.
In Seim’s debut literary novel, two siblings are irrevocably changed by a near-drowning experience.
Jordan and her brother, Chung, live with their parents on a struggling Kansas farm that seems primarily composed of muddy fields and packs of barn cats. Neglected by their alcoholic father and resentment-filled mother—who often come to blows—the siblings are mostly left to raise themselves. During an ill-fated trip to a lakeside campground that results in their parents’ arrest for fighting, Jordan and Chung swim into the water and are sucked under by a whirlpool. After an otherworldly experience on the lakebed, Jordan manages to pull Chung back to the surface and to shore. They’re sent home with their grandparents and return to school the next day, only to realize that they’re no longer the same kids who went into the lake. Jordan now breathes smoke when she’s angry. Chung, when overwhelmed, drops to the ground and flops around like a fish. With these peculiar new features, the siblings face their parents’ separation, their father’s attempt at recovery, a move to a new apartment in a nearby city, new friends, and, as they grow older, first loves and first big losses. Through their ever whirling grief, Jordan and Chung are always circling one another, discovering themselves in the pain and beauty of the vast American plains. Seim’s lyrical prose is shot through with vibrant images, as here, where Jordan discovers her new ability in the school’s tornado tunnel: “Ashy and resembling burnt wood, a cloud of smoke billowed out of her mouth and nose. At first she couldn’t move, couldn’t stop the thing from filling the entirety of the tunnel with her cinders.” Fragmentary in its structure, the novel is held together by the tenderness with which Seim constructs her characters’ relationships. The magical realist elements heighten rather than overshadow this wonderfully stark vision of 21st-century Kansas.
An inventive and deeply felt coming-of-age novel following two siblings.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781680033496
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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