An often moving novel hampered by a tendency toward overwriting.
In Dean’s generational saga, two Missouri families become locked in a deadly feud.
It’s 1973, and Walker Scofield seems bewildered by the falling fortunes of his once-successful clan. The considerable land they once owned in Missouri is now gone, and his son, Merle, is an alcoholic who shows no signs of changing his ways. Walker can’t help but dolefully ask himself,“How had it all gone wrong?” Then Merle’s son, Troy, murders local Bobby Lee Phelps and burns his house down in retribution for taking up with his flirtatious wife, Alisha. Troy is sent to jail, but when he gets out,Alisha leaves town, terrified that he’ll hunt her down and continue his mission of vengeance. She moves in with John Wrenwood, an insurance salesman; however, she’s eventually disappointed when Troy doesn’t come looking for her, and she even feels a strange desire to return to him. Meanwhile, Raelyn Phelps, Bobby Lee’s teenage niece, runs away from home; she’s tired of feeling taken for granted by her parents, who treat her like a servant and routinely beat her. She doesn’t manage to make it very far from home, though, and ends up living with Troy, whom she fears but also finds ruggedly handsome; she also doesn’t care that he killed Bobby Lee, “since she had never particularly liked her uncle.” Word of their relationship travels quickly, setting the stage for a brutal reprisal from the Phelps family, who believe that Troy still hasn’t atoned for his crimes.
In the best parts of this novel, Dean writes with great restraint and intelligence, effectively depicting the downward spiral of the two families and engagingly showing how their grim destinies are intertwined. They all live amid the ruins of their collective descent, and Fairmont, Missouri, is vividly portrayed as a forlorn site of former promise. Furthermore, the author has a notable talent for creating atmosphere; a kind of sad predestination hangs above the Phelpses and Scofields like a darkened storm cloud, just waiting to finally burst. However, Dean’s prose style swings from poetically poignant to gratuitously overwrought, as when the narration notes that “Time had moved at a hectic pace, passing in a variegated rhythm under the malefic sun, and blurring under a series of red moons stretching over decades as time had plodded inexorably forward in a fog of partial recollections.” Another passage uses the term “Beowulfian” as an adjective, which is as pretentious as it is unclear. In addition, the book seems overpopulated with characters and subplots that are likely to ultimately overwhelm the reader. In short, the work sometimes feels as if it’s straining too much for literary heights. That said, the plot at the center of the novel, focusing on the decline and mutual acrimony of the two clans, is elegiacally sad, and many readers will find this to be a darkly enchanting novel—one that transports them to a world filled with despair but not quite empty of hope.
An often moving novel hampered by a tendency toward overwriting.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 979-8487371959
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Cowboy Jamboree Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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