A cozy, if tepid, story of self-reflection and growth—with a little yoga.
Three adults form and navigate their desires in this debut novel.
Nate Dart meets Lulu Betancourt when he takes her yoga class. It’s 1999, and Nate and his girlfriend, Nora Lester, are both approaching 40. Their relationship is at a crossroads: She wants to have a baby, and he’s focused on his thesis. When Nora gets the opportunity to go to Finland to work for Nokia (one of many winking Y2K references), she jumps at it, and they break up. Lulu has been having nightmares related to her traumatic childhood with an alcoholic father. Nora, meanwhile, searches while on her first trip to Europe for a partner who’s willing to have a baby. Soon Lulu and Nate find themselves sharing more than a yoga class, and they do genuinely complement each other. The most entertaining thread in the novel, which unfolds from the trio’s alternating perspectives, is that of Nora’s experiences with the carousel of suitors she encounters on her fish-out-of-water quest to get pregnant. Nate’s story is the least compelling; he struggles to give his scholarly work some measure of emotional insight while examining his own emotional blockages. Often he doesn’t seem like a worthy partner for either Lulu or Nora. Lulu’s personal journey to cope with her past, which includes a trip to New Orleans to connect with her mother’s African American family, overshadows her romantic life. Fish has created some interesting dynamics of adulthood amid Y2K tension, and she ably explores the shifting nature of relationships without casting anyone as the villain. Ultimately, each finds their own way without sabotaging anyone else’s happiness. Toward the conclusion, Fish tends to rush the character development, with exposition that distances us from Lulu, Nora, and Nate as they tie up loose ends, though cheeky bouts of dialogue abound: “Tell Offendorf he’s an unethical slut” and “I thank the god of hormones for our chemistry.”
A cozy, if tepid, story of self-reflection and growth—with a little yoga.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60489-308-3
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2022
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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