An engrossing emotional drama, both shocking and thoughtful.
In this novel, an adopted woman finally finds her birth mother and father, a remarkable discovery that delivers both joy and confusion.
Elizabeth Schmidt had a pleasant upbringing, but as an adopted child, she felt the pangs of a haunting incompleteness. The difference between her and her adoptive family “lay silent and undisturbed between us like a sleeping dog with an uncertain pedigree.” Despite Elizabeth’s great academic and professional success, her personal life is not fully satisfying despite three marriages and five children. Then her adoptive mother, Marie, lets it slip that she received a communication from Alice Maher, Elizabeth’s birth mother’s sister, possibly about an inheritance of some kind, but proceeded to destroy the letter. Elizabeth decides to find Alice—she even hires a private detective—and learns that her mother, Liddy, is actually alive, despite Marie’s declarations to the contrary. Martin, with great subtly and sensitivity, chronicles Elizabeth’s poignant search for her true self and her yearning to fill the “proverbial black hole” of her unknown ancestry. But Elizabeth’s initial euphoria after locating Liddy discovers a darker counterpoint when she also finds her father, Ned, and falls romantically in love with him. Elizabeth soon realizes that Liddy, despite being married to a man named Andy, harbors her own romantic designs on Ned. Martin’s tale is a complex, entangled one filled with unpredictable twists and turns. The story forthrightly discusses the astonishingly illicit affair between Elizabeth and Ned, a provocative subplot handled without a hint of prurient sensationalism. The author deftly shows the emotionally bifurcated world that Elizabeth now inhabits: “But at that moment, I realized I was more like Marie than Liddy. Applying a suitcase full of makeup to perfect my facial features or wearing sexy clothes to draw attention to myself was simply not who I was. Any attempt to reconfigure me as such was destined to fail. Although the beautiful world of Liddy attracted me, I lived in the unadorned and practical world of Marie.” This is a moving novel, crackling with sexual volatility and emotional intelligence.
An engrossing emotional drama, both shocking and thoughtful.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73523-884-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Misericordia Publishing, USA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2022
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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