A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.
A pair of infantile, homicidal brothers decide to take over the family business.
Aiming Palahniuk’s profanely giddy rhetoric at the tea-and-crumpets crowd popularized by Downton Abbey and its ilk sounds like more fun than it turns out to be here. The book utterly unloads with both barrels in a sadistic folktale that aims to satirize homophobia, celebrity death culture, and the British class system all at once, but this much transgressive glee might be more than readers expect. To listen to their rhetoric at the beginning of this short novel, one might think Otto and Cecil really are the “twee, feeble, measly boys” they imagine themselves to be, complete with a nanny to bathe them and tuck them in at night in their manor in the Welsh countryside. It’s a different picture once you get past unreliable narrator Cecil’s flowery prose and realize the wee brothers are actually 20-something young men with a freakish, drug-addicted mother and a patently far-fetched predilection for rape, sodomy, and the lash. They also apparently have a future in the family business, where their grandfather Sir Richard supposedly manages the course of history. From Kent State to the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis, we learn all these pivotal events were the result of the family trade —their mother responsible for flashing a strobe light in a Parisian tunnel, or their grandfather administering a phenobarbital and champagne enema to Judy Garland in 1969. “Those misdeeds that need doing,” as Cecil explains, include the deaths of figures like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and Diana, Princess of Wales, among others. If the history askew doesn’t grab you, by all means stay for the plethora of servant murders (“Then there was the year the maid got herself killed. Don’t ask me which”) or the rapists and killers Otto goads into visiting or the tutor Otto buggers so senseless that he gives himself over to the little bastards’ ministrations to make him more like them.
A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668021415
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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