An affecting, decades-spanning tale of love and mental illness.
A family is torn apart by schizophrenia in Martin’s historical novel.
Jamie Murphy was raised to be a priest, but at the last moment, the 21-year-old seminarian forsakes the vocation in favor of business school and a chance at romantic love. He meets Katie Houlihan, a college-bound secretary at a law office, and falls fast for her. In less than a year, they’re married, and Katie is pregnant. After the birth of their daughter Meggie, however, Katie is plagued by feelings of depression, anxiety, and rage. “I can’t explain what was wrong with me,” she tells her sister, describing her mood in the months after the birth. “It was like I was dead inside, unable to feel anything at all. I was trapped in an awful place.” After the birth of a second daughter, Katie starts having delusions that she is a prophet of God and that Satan is attempting to undo her with demons disguised as family members. Jaime is forced to institutionalize his wife, who is diagnosed with dementia praecox—also known as schizophrenia. Will he ever get his beloved Katie back, or is she lost forever inside the twin labyrinths of a poorly understood disease and an ill-equipped mental health system? The novel’s first 100 pages are largely friction-free. Jamie and Katie are wholesome, bland people who everyone likes and who like each other. This makes the horror of Katie’s condition that much more striking when it arrives. Here, Katie arrives at the hospital but won’t give up her infant, Patsy: “Two towering male orderlies had stepped in, and even the nurse, who, despite her starched white dress and cap, resembled a wrestler, had pried Patsy from Katie’s arms….Katie’s screams had pierced the air as the orderlies strapped her to the gurney, kicking and thrashing all the way inside.” Martin takes the readers to dark places but does so with a great deal of compassion, dramatizing an experience that even today is surrounded by shame and misunderstanding.
An affecting, decades-spanning tale of love and mental illness.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781735238890
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Misericordia Publishing, USA
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2024
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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