An uneven collection whose best stories are ultimately satisfying.
Burke offers a compilation of short fiction, poetry, and flash fiction that she calls “my latest exploration of jazz, poker, falling in love, sunsets, and life’s amazing adventures.”
The author presents a collection of her work in three sections—stories, poems, and “microfiction”—that finish with the title story. The 10 initial tales range in length from three to 15 pages and often center on love and music. In “Middle School Love,” for instance, the narrator reflects, years after the fact, on working out the second movement of George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” right before going on a first date: “When I was not sixteen anymore, the heartbreak served up a valuable lesson,” she recalls. “There’s a moment when you know whether you can trust another person with your love.” Likewise in “Second-Hand Squeeze Box,” a woman accompanies her friend to buy a clarinet in a 1980s pawn shop and is unexpectedly “ambushed” by a heavy, old squeeze-box accordion: “I couldn’t resist,” she remembers. “The mother-of-pearl buttons and deeply folded bellows called out to me from behind glass”; she ends up meeting—and being charmed by—the instrument’s original owner. The volume’s poems are less narratively straightforward, with items such as “The Mirror” being typical: “How have I aged? / With aggravation and adaptation / An eye on my career and professional veneer / With stumbles and fumbles and all kind of errors.”
As with most mixed-form collections, the results are uneven. The poetry, for example, is largely unremarkable, and the untitled flash-fiction samples often feel unformed and unfulfilling. “The neighbors behind me pulled into their driveway, headlights blindingly announcing themselves through my bedroom window,” begins one of the latter, finishing up with, “Must I be awakened?” The collection’s longer stories, by contrast, are full of compelling imagery and narrative interest. All are quite strong, and some are excellent. The book’s title piece is a standout, in which a cellist from a small Alabama symphony orchestra travels back to her native New York City in pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream. A disreputable online seller has convinced her that he possesses and is willing to part with the manuscript of the first movement of an unknown symphony by her musical hero, Gustav Holst. When she meets with him, he pulls a gun on her, and she’s only narrowly rescued by police, who—in the story’s only unconvincing detail—cursorily send her on her way, manuscript in hand. She soon consults a series of well-drawn specialists who offer their opinions regarding authenticity of the Meteor Symphony. In this and other tales, Burke strikes a wonderfully convincing note of world-weariness, with narrators who’ve been scarred by love but somehow still maintain a capacity for wonder. Many of the works then convincingly supply elements that are worthy of that wonder. Overall, the set would have been stronger if the poetry and flash-fiction had been dropped, but even so, the longer stories carry the day.
An uneven collection whose best stories are ultimately satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798992351903
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Queen Esther Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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