An intriguing but brooding coming-of-age tale.
In this debut novel, a young woman’s search for details about her dead mother leads her to a guitar hero.
February 1988. As the winter wind blows through the pines of Eastern North Carolina, 18-year-old Luna Kane sits with her dying great-grandfather. The man has not spoken for nine years, not since Luna’s mother died by suicide, but he now delivers his final words—cryptic sentences about owls and music. The words spark a long-buried memory in Luna: an image of her hippie mother, Claudia, and a black-and-white photograph of a rock star. “The two of them were intertwined in my mind’s eye,” narrates Luna, “like ashes wafting in a summer wind, waiting for water to receive them. I was born of water and moonlight, and of her and of him.” The rock star is Jimmy Page, the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist. As a high school graduation present, Luna’s uncle gives her a copy of Jimmy’s first solo record, which prompts a fainting spell and another vision. It seems Jimmy’s music is a means to unlock the secrets of Claudia’s life, granting Luna access to the mother she barely knew. To find out the whole truth about Claudia and her own origins, Luna will have to go to England and meet the man himself. Despite the pop culture premise, Hallberg treats the story with absolute seriousness, delving into the complex psychologies of Luna and her mother. The prose is sometimes overwrought, but always moody and surprising, as here when Luna examines the residence where the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died: “I stared at the main house. There were others on the estate, by the banks of the Thames, the river’s edge, swans floating in the freezing water. Swan song for a drummer. What about the owls? Had there been owls crying in the night when Bonzo died, hovering at the window, watching him, waiting? Where had Jimmy been?” The novel is strangely gripping, and fans of Led Zeppelin, in particular, will enjoy how the author has woven the band’s mythology through Luna’s odyssey. Unfortunately, it treads too often into melodrama. Readers just want to have fun, but Hallberg and Luna aren’t interested in levity.
An intriguing but brooding coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60489-292-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2021
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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