An impressive and luminous assemblage of artful and quietly devastating tales.
A Canadian author incorporates themes of loss, betrayal, redemption, and hope in this short story collection.
Having published numerous short story anthologies, Speak reaffirms her grasp of the form with 12 resonant tales. The brilliant, darkly comic opener and one of the book’s standouts, “Rock Paper Scissors,” is a master class in characterization. The story introduces Alice, 60, who, despite being divorced and depressed, anchors a rudderless, dysfunctional band of walking disasters. These include her unemployed adult son; her philandering boss; a daughter and fiance desperately struggling with artificial insemination; her infirm mother; and a dying boyfriend. It is a seemingly hopeless situation peopled by the downtrodden. This type of scenario surfaces in other tales like “Wilderness,” about a husband who prepares his dying wife for assisted suicide, and “Lake of Many Islands,” in which a group of friends assembles for a weekend of unexpected revelations. The engrossing title story features a disillusioned, aging artist abandoned by her partner only to discover a new love—one just as bruised by life as she is—waiting on her doorstep. The author’s prose is blissfully lyrical and often descriptively sets each tale’s tone in a single sentence. Impatient people beaten down by a winter season stomp across a snowy sidewalk “with the teeth of their winter boots, they have assaulted it with their demand for spring”; folks consumed with soul-searching do so with the passion of “a detective out to find a missing person”; first snowflakes are as “large as goose feathers turning in the air, perfect and pure.” Speak’s stories champion aging underdogs, many addled by disease or discontent, and throughout their grief or despair, she demonstrates an acute sensitivity to their plights. Into tales that could become overly sentimental, she injects redemption and sacrifice, as evidenced in the collection’s best-realized entry, “Honour,” leavening what seems like perennial hopelessness with glimmers of fun, renewal, and promise. The author rises to the challenge of compiling a group of Canada-set stories that will enchant with the beautiful, diverse, and ever evolving essence of human nature. As one character adores another’s wrinkles and sees “all the beauty life has wrought in her face,” readers will appreciate how Speak translates life’s pain and struggles into beauty.
An impressive and luminous assemblage of artful and quietly devastating tales.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-912298-7
Page Count: 348
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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