A masterful assemblage of environmentally minded tales.
A collection of short fiction taps into eco-compromised lives in southern Ontario.
As one character observes in Huebert’s volume, Canada is a country built on oil. The tension between resource extraction and environmental collapse—both out in the world and inside the home—is ever present in this linked cycle of 11 stories. An oil refinery worker—who ponders the increasing number of dead birds as well as his mother’s recent demise—starts thinking about how he’d like to be buried. A high school girl enters into an inappropriate relationship with her English teacher, though it’s as much about the older woman’s knowledge of plants as it is about anything sexual. The mother of a baby feels her life unravel as she tries desperately to rid her home of a mouse infestation. “The thing about rodents,” the exterminator tells the horrified woman, whose husband works at one of the many local plants, “is that they’re a lot like oil…Just like how there’s pipelines all around you but you never see them….Same thing with the rodents.” Oil is a recurring image, but it’s not just a metaphor: The black blood of these tales is squeezed from the remains of plants, animals, and human beings alike. Huebert has a razor-sharp wit and an exacting eye for human foibles, as here where he describes one character’s eco-conscious—yet decidedly not self-aware—love interest: “Daddy Issues doesn’t use social media, refuses to milk data from his flesh. He wears plaid and vegan Blundstones, grooms his beard with fine-toothed sandalwood. He has two long dimples above his pouting buttocks, likes to joke that his rear end is luscious with negative capability.” The stories are often on the longer side, and they pack a novelistic level of detail. The author manages to offer intimate portraits of human lives without ever letting readers forget the climate bubbling just outside their windows. Huebert’s assortment of activists, hockey players, preppers, and nurses find themselves on the front lines of crises in which every choice has a moral dimension—and readers will be right there with them.
A masterful assemblage of environmentally minded tales.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77196-447-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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