A compelling slice-of-life tale that will keep readers engaged to the very end.
In this novel, a man faces all sorts of moral dilemmas and makes tortured decisions.
Alan Agnalini is a guy with a nothing life and few ambitions. Yet he does try to do the right thing when he needs to, although “he’s not happy unless he’s making himself miserable.” In college, he loses his virginity to Brooke Hadley. She becomes pregnant and bears his child, a daughter. He finally finds out that he’s a father when he reconnects with Brooke a few years later. But he only sees his daughter from afar before she is killed in a freak traffic accident. Brooke moves away, only to return for a tantalizing cameo. Then he meets the ravishing Marissa Liotti from New Jersey who has several tragedies in her past. He falls in love with her, but for various reasons he breaks things off. Still, he can’t forget her and discovers that she is pregnant. The story then hustles to the end, when Alan has to confront another agonizing decision. This development should precipitate wonderful turmoil in a book club discussion. While Lalli’s tale may take too much time exploring Alan’s moral dilemmas, it offers an intriguing take on a man’s life. Along the way, readers meet Alan’s large Italian clan—especially his needy, aging father—and learn the story of the protagonist’s growing up in Morehead, New Jersey, and breaking away from the old neighborhood and culture. One revealing aspect of his personality, for example, is that Alan is a bit of a snob and can even be a jerk. But at least he is learning these things about himself. In fact, the novel could be titled The Education of Alan Agnalini. There are improbable plot devices and coincidences, and readers will have to decide whether, in the final analysis, they can be accepted in service to the theme. Still, caveats aside, Lalli has devised a very clever plot here. New details have a way of popping up just when the audience will think there are none left.
A compelling slice-of-life tale that will keep readers engaged to the very end.Pub Date: July 29, 2024
ISBN: 9798887472058
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2023
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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