A beguiling genre-splicer, strewn with questions and some answers.
Who was Gertrude Stein and what was her meaning? Those are the questions asked by a 21st-century writer visiting Paris and forging new friendships there.
Levy’s latest is an inventive meld of biography and novel that interleaves a consideration of Stein’s development and uniqueness with an account of three female friends in the French capital in 2024. The unnamed narrator, a published writer, is researching and composing an essay on Stein while spending time with Eva, a graphic novelist whose cat is missing, and finance worker Fanny, who’s blessed with three female lovers. A loose chronology is applied to the Stein material, beginning with her American origins and medical training in the 1890s. Arriving in Paris at 29 in 1903, Stein initially lived with her brother, Leo, with whom she hosted salons and collected “outlaw” art—Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne. Stein met Alice B. Toklas in 1907, became her wife, and together endured Europe’s upheavals, surviving the Nazis—both were Jewish—by moving to the countryside. Stein wrote constantly in many forms, achieving fame at 60 with her bestselling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it’s her reputation as a modernist that endures. The narrator’s thoughts on her subject loop through Stein’s iconoclastic role, her starry friends and admirers, and her often gnomic writing, which is quoted frequently. What emerges is a persuasive portrait of Stein—unfettered by corsets, curiously magnetic to men despite her queerness, a self-proclaimed genius who wanted to “excavate the future.” “Stein and Picasso had made a new language,” Levy writes. “The door was no long ajar between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They had broken the chain and opened the door.” One character tells the narrator: “You will write about the avant-garde in the language of realism,” which is partly true in this short, witty, intriguing work.
A beguiling genre-splicer, strewn with questions and some answers.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780374602079
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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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