A stiff, awkward coming-of-age story.
A Connecticut man questions his sexuality over the course of his life in Robinson’s novel.
In 1961, Cliff Ryan is 8 years old, watching JFK’s inauguration on TV in his parents’ West Hartford, Connecticut, home. “She’s so pretty,” his mother remarks as the camera captures Jackie Kennedy. “Cliff, I hope you marry a girl like that.” This interaction sets up the central question of the narrative: What kind of person (and of what gender) will Cliff settle down with? As Cliff grows up, the narrator notes that he experiences “what some people today (2025) call the heteronormative socialization process”; he’s taught to square dance with girls in his fourth grade gym class, is rejected by a pretty girl at a friend’s bar mitzvah, and is reprimanded by his gym teacher for getting an erection in the shower with other boys. As an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, Cliff watches The Boys in the Band with his roommate, Ralph. The experience encourages Cliff to pursue his attraction to women, while Ralph turns the other way. As Cliff graduates, goes to law school, and then enters the working world, the question remains: Is a woman really what he wants? A subplot follows Cliff’s brother, Howard, who is six years Cliff’s senior, a burger restaurant employee who goes on an ill-fated date with a rich Wellesley student named Jane. He chafes against the expectation that men should pay on dates, and after a fight with Jane about the roles of women and men, he is drafted and sent to Vietnam. While the novel’s explorations of the nuances of human sexuality are intriguing, Robinson’s stilted syntax makes the book a frustrating read. The author frequently pauses the action to shoehorn in unnecessary historical context: “The DJ (disk jockey) is playing records (songs) that are on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in October 1965.” The straightforward vocabulary and explanatory tone make the book read like a middle-grade novel, but later chapters in Cliff’s life explicitly describe sex scenes in a clinical tone.
A stiff, awkward coming-of-age story.Pub Date: June 12, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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