A sensitive and moving tale of family tragedy and renewal.
A novel focuses on a family fractured by a series of shocks and secrets.
Eddy Kimes, one of the main characters in Seaburn’s tale, is a longtime supervisor for a cable company. Although he’s lived through many changes of company ownership, as the story opens, he’s increasingly worried that this latest pause in work is actually the dreaded L-word: layoff. This problem comes on top of the concern now undergirding his entire life: His wife, Gayle, a tax accountant with a booming business, has recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and suddenly she’s requiring medicine, extra care, and chemotherapy. This development brings home their two adult children, Richie and Sandy, who have become almost strangers in the time since they moved out of the family house. “There were Facebook posts and texts and the rare visits, but it was different in ways that he couldn’t put into words,” Eddy reflects. “All he knew was that they had become warm, affable acquaintances, people you enjoyed but didn't know.” Richie and Sandy are carrying their own baggage. While Eddy is trying to hold the situation together alone (“Sometimes you have to keep things to yourself,” he thinks, “otherwise, everything might crash into a million pieces on the floor”), he’s receiving a surprising amount of support from his visits to the statue of Christ the Consoler at the nearby First Presbyterian Church. At one point in Seaburn’s engaging story, readers are told: “Every person’s suffering is singular, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.” And yet the tale’s main theme belies this sentiment; the book is a poignant and convincing portrayal of how suffering can be softened by both faith and community. The author’s dramatization of the day-to-day realities of living with cancer is etched with fine details and deep compassion. Without any fanfare, this element of the novel comes to dominate the others, tilting a faith and relationship tale into an illness and coping story that explores powerful emotions.
A sensitive and moving tale of family tragedy and renewal.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-433764-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
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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