An engaging, Steinbeckian look at climate change and its emotional costs.
A rural California family, struggling to make financial and emotional ends meet, faces the destructive threat of wildfires.
In the gold country of the California foothills, a place of picturesque natural beauty, residents know full well that conditions are always primed for a forest fire, that, in the words of Wallace Stegner—used here as an epigraph—the beautiful land ultimately “imposes itself” on them, and “sets the rules for [their] existence.” Briefly imprisoned a decade ago for growing medical marijuana, 65-year-old grape farmer Ben Hecht has been keeping a low profile, a little tired but grateful to have returned to his challenging yet rewarding farm life and to Ada, his novelist wife. Like early-evening sunlight streaming down the mountains, their world lately has been looking good, even promising. Their son, Yoel, has been painfully estranged from Ben, but now, back home after working in Los Angeles, seems surprisingly interested in reconciliation. Family and new friends surround them, proffering glasses of good wine or an occasional joint, just as they are surrounded by a happy menagerie of dogs, chickens, geese, and emus. There has even emerged the distinct possibility of Ben starting a wine-making business. Then, one day, a distant black plume of smoke changes everything. The wildfire that eventually tears through the area hurts the Hechts financially, but it is the obliteration of Ada’s work in progress that tips the family into a tailspin—this, and Yoel’s sudden involvement with an environmental group preparing to move from complaint to physical action, and Ben’s now-constant, justified worry of another, greater fire that would plunge them into poverty. Gumbiner examines the minutiae of the Hecht family’s life, their viniculture, their industry, their mellow California woods culture, sometimes to the detriment of narrative action, but his characters glow tenderly on the page. They are a good group of people to root for, at the shifting mercy of the winds that blow past their heads, trapped inside an ecosystem heating up steadily, past the point of hopeful disregard. Gumbiner crafts an important story, the fictional equivalent of outdoor warning sirens screaming above smoldering pine trees.
An engaging, Steinbeckian look at climate change and its emotional costs.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781662602429
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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