A sensitive but unsparing coming-of-age drama.
An earnest novel about the journey of a young Mexican immigrant.
This debut novel by Thomas, a longtime immigration rights activist, opens in Los Angeles in 2015, when Alma Cruz’s 14-year-old daughter, Luz, accuses her of knowing nothing about the plight of Central American refugee children detained at the Texas border. Luz’s outburst prompts Alma to reflect on her own life and on secrets that she can never reveal. Her story begins when her beloved father, Juan Cruz—who traveled annually from Oaxaca City, Mexico, to work in California—disappears in 1997, leaving his wife and four children back home. Alma’s dream of becoming a math teacher is shattered, and her mother’s distant cousin moves in with them, which further complicates matters. Unwilling to accept that her father has deserted them, Alma hatches a plan to go north and seek help from her half brother, Diego, in Los Angeles and from Dolores Huerta, a famous activist about whom her father had spoken. Alma and her sister, Rosa, eventually team up with Manuel, a 16-year-old refugee from Guatemala. In an author’s note, Thomas addresses at length the research she undertook and the issues involved in telling this story as a non-Latina author. Her use of Alma’s math journal, which includes story problems (with answers provided in the back of the book), is an especially effective storytelling device. This, along with the tender depiction of first love and an epilogue by Alma’s daughter, Luz, may make the novel intriguing for YA readers. Readers should be warned, however, that the characters’ attempts to cross the border build to a tragic, life-changing event in the Arizona desert involving sexual assault. Alma is a compelling narrator throughout, and Thomas’ clear, simple prose conveys the terrifying encounters and moments of danger that mark her journey. Minor characters, including Alma’s former teacher and a nurse’s aide who helps Alma evade a detention center, also emerge as fully rounded individuals.
A sensitive but unsparing coming-of-age drama.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-870-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2020
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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