An inventive, incisive novel about the psychology of modern China.
In Woo’s novel, a young woman attempts to break free from her life under communist rule.
Little Comrade is unfulfilled. The young woman works 12 hours a day on a factory assembly line in the People’s Republic of Qina. She sleeps in a bunk house with other workers, including her best friend, Bo Bo, who teases her about her lack of a boyfriend. Little Comrade claims she’ll find one soon, but she isn’t very taken with her options. Indeed, she feels ambivalent about much of her existence—a perspective that puts her at odds with the state-mandated patriotism she should be feeling. To highlight this contradiction, the novel takes the form of a pamphlet put out by the Qinese Bureau of Public Affairs. The second-person narration addresses Little Comrade as a hypothetical stand-in for an entire generation of women: “You want to move to a nicer place like this ‘America’ you have heard so much about…maybe you have always felt this way, ever since you were a baby girl in your father’s village, before you got a job at the factory in the big city. Do not fret, this book can help you overcome that tiresome and unwanted desire.” The guide advises Little Comrade on how to navigate her relationships, check her ambitions, and learn to appreciate her motherland, but can she suppress her dreams of a better life in America without killing the best part of herself? Woo’s prose is deceptively nimble. While the format could easily feel gimmicky, it proves incredibly adaptive, capturing moments of beauty and sorrow in addition to the frequent flourishes of humor: “The inhabitants are still living there, growing vegetables in Styrofoam boxes…old grannies and grandpas with their teeth missing, with shrunken, shriveled bodies. You, too, if you are lucky, dear Little Comrade, will look like them one day.” It’s a short, devastating read, one that will stick with the reader long after it’s over.
An inventive, incisive novel about the psychology of modern China.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781989496626
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Buckrider Books
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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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