An elegantly written and damning narrative.
In Hogan’s debut novel, a pregnant teenager’s life is irrevocably changed when she’s sent to a home and school for unwed mothers in conservative 1950s Tennessee.
After 17-year-old Joanna Wilson becomes pregnant, she quickly finds herself in in a Southern gothic nightmare. She suffers physical abuse at the hands of her father, and her married lover, Jack Wyatt, who’s still devoted to his injured wife, sends her off to the Frances Weston Home in Knoxville. It’s a place for young unmarried women to give birth, away from the prying eyes of judgmental Tennessee society; for the women sequestered there, it’s both a schoolhouse and a jail, where the wardens are stoic, “crowlike” nuns. This prisonlike setting, where everything beyond the house’s gardens is off-limits, is fertile ground for Hogan to explore the culture and misogyny of a classist, racist 1950s and ’60s America. The real horror of the home for unwed mothers, however, is not simply its restrictiveness, but what happens to the babies; they’re put up for adoption, no matter what their mothers’ wishes are, and the women never know exactly what becomes of their children. As time passes, the novel follows Joanna and others from the home as they enter adulthood, exploring how they grapple with the trauma of separation. Over the course of the novel, Hogan’s prose is pared down but deliberate, reflecting the staid resilience of her central characters. The narrative, while alarming, is very much grounded in the reality of the time and place in which it’s set. It’s clear that many women in similar situations never received answers about what happened to their children, but in this novel, Hogan does offer a hint of relief. Overall, it’s a narrative that builds slowly, hovering on a photograph as a missing piece in a puzzle, and coalescing in a resounding defense of women’s reproductive autonomy.
An elegantly written and damning narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949116-53-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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