A mature, uplifting, and wise group of poems.
Sperber presents an illustrated poetry collection dedicated to life’s small beauties and the Southwestern landscape.
This collection of poems alternates between reflections on a well-lived life and love letters to the New Mexico environs the author inhabits, noting “rolling sagebrush” (“Blue Dawn”), a “coyote by the mailbox” (“Heartbeat Behind the Glass”), and the scent of “mint and sweet grass” (“A Small Love, Obviously Wild”). Each poem offers a meditation on the precious elements of life that commonly go unacknowledged. In “Gears of the Night,” the speaker moves away from the clichés of Christmas Eve to focus on the nonhuman lives that thrum onward, oblivious, as when a tiny creature achieves a quiet, detailed triumph: “There was a snail working / his way up a drainpipe. / He’d stopped and rested some hours, / his slime hardening on the corrugated metal. / With no fanfare at all, / he returned to his journey up the pipe.” “Blue Dawn” unexpectedly locates sublime beauty in a routine desert commute to the office, where the speaker and her co-workers must “sit like computer chips before [their] monitors.” Other poems are rich with concise and grounded wisdom, such as the speaker’s observation that “some parts of us / are just dreams / it’s time to wake from” (“Wake Up!”). These verses identify microscopic aspects of life, magnifying them until they become something brilliant; the world the author brings into focus is stunning. A steady sense of optimism underlies each poem, unburdened by unrealistic or fantastical expectations for life. Sperber’s intricate drawings accompany the poems, providing a deeper look into the simple beauties that motivate her work. By the end of the book, the author has made her message abundantly clear: “We own so little, really,” the title poem reminds us, and yet everything is possible.
A mature, uplifting, and wise group of poems.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781956056631
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Shanti Arts LLC
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
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