A wonderfully imaginative but undercooked set of tales that falls short of its potential.
Braum’s third collection of short stories offers tales of magical realism.
The characters in these stories have relatable desires, but they have supernatural forces working against them, often in the periphery. In “The Monkey Coat,” June has had bad luck since David, the father of their daughter, Ivy, left unexpectedly. Her fortunes get worse when she finds a family heirloom in a storage shed: a coat made of monkey’s fur. After she starts wearing it, her relationships with others take a bad turn and she eventually goes missing—leaving the coat, and perhaps a curse, for Ivy. In “Rebbe Yetse’s Shadow,” a young man trying to straighten out his life faces a choice offered by two ghosts. In “Cloudland Earthbound,” a man battles the government and other mysterious powers as he tries to preserve a nightclub in Brisbane, Australia. In the opener, “How To Stay Afloat When Drowning,” a man looking for direction becomes intrigued by a woman who may actually be a sea creature. The premises are creative, with the characters usually facing strange choices in unusual circumstances. However, they often feel as if there’s something missing. In “Between Our Earth and Their Moon,” for instance, a big source of tension is a man named Grant Donovan, who’s supposed to be the heavy of the piece, but readers never get a clear sense of what’s motivating his actions. Similarly, Nate, the narrator of the story, is driven by a previous relationship with someone named Alexandra, but the story never reveals enough about her to make that relationship important to the readers. There are also frequent scenes in which the setting isn’t firmly established before the action starts, as in “Tommy’s Shadow,” when Marco and his friend Richie talk about taking a fateful trip to an asylum. The conversation prods Marco to get into his car, but it makes for an awkward scene because readers don’t know where the characters were when they started.
A wonderfully imaginative but undercooked set of tales that falls short of its potential.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59021-583-8
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
