An ambitious if uneven debut exploring the possibilities of love, self-realization, and art under and beyond the White gaze.
Saddled with the name of his “father's favorite writer” by his colonial-throwback Jamaican parents, aspiring author Kipling Starling is desperate to be published and will do seemingly anything to realize his dream.
Encouraged in writing by his schoolteachers and believing himself “useless at anything but,” Kip built his personality from the expectations and literary opinions of others and the blueprint for his future from those he saw as his predecessors, assimilating Dostoevsky’s style by repeatedly rereading Crime and Punishment and leaving his family in London for New York because fellow “skinny gay black” writer James Baldwin had found success in America. More than recognition of his work or talent, Kip seems to crave the legitimization that acceptance from the predominantly White world of publishing would signify, as he “flounder[s] in the wake of a peculiar invention called Whiteness.” Having been kicked out of his MFA program and despairing over a spate of rejections for his historical novel about E.M. Forster’s relationship with Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed El Adl, Kip receives an inexplicable invitation to meet with a “publishing legend” who was among his rejectors. In the meeting, she implies that a rewrite from Mohammed's perspective might entice her, but there's a catch: In four weeks' time, “a commercial media conglomerate” will acquire the publisher, and the editor expresses nebulous doubts that she will be allowed to continue acquiring literary fiction after the merger is complete. Thus Kip is launched on a frenzied three-week rewrite quest, and he barricades himself in the basement of the Brooklyn brownstone he shares with his well-intentioned but oblivious White psychotherapist husband, Ben. As boundaries between Mohammed and Kip in his isolation begin to dissolve and a mysterious entity appears, Kip is propelled into a still larger quest to find his “true voice” in a wilderness beyond the confines of Whiteness itself. Though the result is an overplotted and lopsided narrative with a sometimes-tedious start crawling toward a rushed ending, the book still shines at times in the elegance of its prose and its depictions of a stark arctic landscape and in Kip’s musings through Mohammed’s story on the intersections of colonialism, White supremacy, and queer love, particularly the liberatory potentialities of queer love between Black men.
An ambitious if uneven debut exploring the possibilities of love, self-realization, and art under and beyond the White gaze.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-315955-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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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