A polyphonic swan song for a trilogy about identity and family.
An artist gets his posthumous due in Mengay’s literary novel, the third in a series.
Jake, the alienated hero of the first two volumes in the author’s Eldorado trilogy, is dead…in the present, at least, where his paintings have found posthumous popularity in the art world. His mixed-race, trans nephew Will has taken up the story of Jake and his twin sister Wren (Will’s mom) from the vantage of the quiet Western town of Eldorado, where Jake lived out his final years. As a kid, Will was never much interested in Jake, whom he thought of as “untoasted Wonder Bread.” It’s only at college that Will realizes Jake is a major and incendiary queer artist, described by one tabloid as “The Diabolic Dabbler, Painter of Perversions, and Prince of Peccadillos.” Though Will is Jake’s lone surviving blood relative, he is not the heir to or executor of the dead man’s estate: that role goes to Serge, the friend whom Jake’s husband Tommy (also deceased) referred to as “the other husband.” Will does have access to Jake’s papers, though—an archive of documents that tell the story of Jake and Wren and others in their sprawling web of relatives, friends, and lovers, much of which is relevant to Will’s understanding of his own history. As Will’s investigation unfolds, the narration becomes untethered to his time and point of view, drifting through other characters’ experiences at various points across the decades and bringing Jake and Wren back to temporary life. Mengay’s prose is dense and philosophical: “It’s a mind game, to come upon an archive,” observes Will with typical lyricism. “Like looting a grave. An archive’s a crypt, and cryptic; bursting surprises, things you didn’t expect or want to come upon; things you don’t want to know.” Elegiac and sweeping, the novel examinesthe ways that history can traumatize you into making art, and how art can heal even after the artist has gone.
A polyphonic swan song for a trilogy about identity and family.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
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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