An entertaining, deeply imagined literary melodrama.
Oddball New Jersey kids grow up with family values that grow increasingly sinister in McConnell’s labyrinthine coming-of-age novel.
The author centers the story on Darius Van Nest, an eccentric elementary school student at Lawrence Academy in Westerbrook, New Jersey, who’s convinced of his own “illustriousness” and fixated, to the dismay of his English teacher, Jane Brzostovsky, on the incestuous dysfunctions of the infamous Borgia family. Darius’ adoptive parents—his wealthy father Oliver, who’s given to nasty put-downs and Holocaust denial; and his mother Sohaila, a beautiful and shallow Iranian immigrant—are equally off-kilter, especially after Oliver lets Sohaila move her lover into the mansion. Darius’ only friend is classmate Barry Paul, an ordinary 12-year-old kid who’s abused by a manipulative adult, which leaves festering psychological wounds. McConnell follows these characters through the 1980s and ’90s. Darius drifts through Columbia University, Paris, and relationships with several men, including Alan Wilkinson, an aloof student of the philosophy of mathematics; and Rolf, a kindly German aristocrat. Jane is roped into a scheme by Darius’ childhood French tutor, David Caperini, to sell valuable artworks stolen from the Van Nest mansion, and Barry returns home after years out West and reconnects with a wealthy lawyer, Preston Sayles. McConnell’s often darkly comic narrative depicts families as snake-pits of subtle power plays, rich men as unbalanced, and social life as an awkward struggle to paper cheerful good manners over fear, resentment, and boredom. His prose is full of brilliantly evocative character sketches: “Oliver was silent at first. Rude. He flared his nostrils. He sat perfectly still and seemed to count something by means of the nostril-flarings….like a lizard, motionless except for its reptilian dewlap flexing. McConnell’s superb eye for detail reveals layered dramas in a single piercing glance: “One couple was almost lost in shadow in the back. The girl, in tears maybe, bent over her knees. She looked sickened by something her boyfriend had told her. The boy was torturing a matchbook, staring at it with clockmaker’s concentration and an air of contempt.” From a tangle of inappropriate, unpropitious relationships, McConnell unspools sharp-eyed psychological insights.
An entertaining, deeply imagined literary melodrama.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798988282952
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PERSPECTIVES
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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