An elegant but somewhat tedious tale about professionals promoting personal growth.
A novel explores the world of the self-help workshop.
Rae Milford is an author and expert on childhood trauma, helping her clients prevent their pasts from ruining their presents. Unfortunately, her own marriage is on the rocks. Her husband, Alan, has cancer, but why is it so hard for Rae to be emotionally supportive? David Levine is a psychotherapist who thinks constantly about aging. How long, he wonders, until he turns into one of the older men he sees in the showers at the Russell Road Racquet Club? Gil Broadbent is a former biologist and recovering alcoholic who still hits up the clubs searching for his soul mate. He’s transitioned to a new career as a workshop leader, still attempting to understand his own dysfunctions. The three friends meet up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur to lead a five-day intensive workshop called “Life Beyond Your Limitations,” but are they really in a position to guide people to better versions of themselves? Their California workshop includes eight big personalities, bringing with them issues related to alcohol, sex, work, and childhood trauma. This year, things seem bound to come to a head, not just for the students in the workshop, but for the teachers as well. The authors’ prose is clean and smooth, capturing the small shifts of emotion and energy in the classroom: “Looking around the room, Rae observed tears in others’ eyes, including David’s and Gil’s. Rae also found the little girl’s pleas plaintive and compelling, and felt annoyed when she caught Todd looking at his watch. Rae was aware of heat rising in her cheeks.” The book reads like a credible depiction of a personal growth workshop, and its sustained focus on the issues of a small group of characters makes for an intriguing exercise in human psychology. But the novel—by Bowden and debut authors Chouteau and Balaban—is just a bit too long at 357 pages. The big events are not quite as high stakes as readers will want them to be. It’s a strong premise, but the authors’ commitment to realism ultimately robs the story of much of its potential drama.
An elegant but somewhat tedious tale about professionals promoting personal growth.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7331978-0-9
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Guesthouse Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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