A languorously unfurling novel that rewards the reader’s attention and time.
A writer recounts the dissolution of a relationship through the lens of her experience, not her art.
When the novel opens, the narrator and her erstwhile lover, Xavier, are already estranged. Xavier is much older, and the last time she’d seen him, three months earlier, she’d said she didn’t want to kiss him, citing his age. Xavier cut off the relationship. He will have to find someone “more suitable,” he’d said in an email, and furthermore, her most recent book, which she’d given him at lunch, was “some kind of HELL.” They haven’t communicated since then, and the speaker, though so hurt by Xavier’s reaction to her book that she describes herself as “winded,” reacts to his rejection with equanimity. “He might be old, and he really is very old now,” she says, “but that doesn’t stop him from hurting and wanting.” The rest of this languid, sensuous book—the term novel is too prescriptive for a project that dismisses all impetus toward narrative progression—is very much focused on this sense of wanting. The speaker’s identity as a successful writer is a central point throughout (she receives communications from her publisher; her former A-level English teacher contacts her to say he’s read her first two novels), yet she doesn’t view her world through an artist’s lens, but rather with the immediacy of a body’s experience. Former lovers, including Xavier, are detailed with the same kind of transcendent sensitivity that is employed in a nonerotic context to describe bouquets of flowers, the logistics of ocean swimming, conversations with friends in the backs of cars, the beauty of a well-made fire. The speaker’s exquisite sensibility, and her assured sense of her own perceptions, provides a throughline for the pastiche of scenes, dreams, and conversations that make up this book. Where their lack of continuity might discourage some readers, the treatment of Xavier as he loops through the book’s past, present, and—perhaps—future reminds us that the goal of art is sometimes to see clearly and specifically what is there to be seen, with no duty to dictate its progress or its outcome.
A languorously unfurling novel that rewards the reader’s attention and time.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217046645
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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