A darkly unsettling but highly readable novel by a leading voice in Latin American fiction.
In his latest short but powerful autobiographical novel, Halfon continues reflecting on the traumas of the Holocaust while raising the question of whether they are beyond the scope of fiction.
In 1984, three years after his family moved to Florida to escape the brutal civil war in Guatemala, 13-year-old Eduardo and his younger brother are sent back to their homeland to participate in a Jewish children’s camp. Although his parents don’t say so, Halfon thinks they wanted to “restore” their Americanized children to Judaism. But the camp turns out to be a horrific place—a simulated concentration camp where the idea is to mistreat the kids into appreciating how evil the Nazis were. “Jewish children…need to learn as early as possible…that everyone else is an antisemite, that the whole world revolves around this most ancient hatred,” says their counselor, Samuel Blum, who wears an SS uniform and a swastika armband and first appears with a tarantula crawling down his arm. A desperate Eduardo escapes the camp, getting lost and confused in the mountains but finding safe haven with a young Indigenous woman. But Halfon, who witnessed the post-Auschwitz delirium of his Polish grandfather, will never be able to escape such painful memories—or the ones he creates himself. “Is imagination so fanciful and audacious that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?” he asks, haunted by a “No Dogs or Jews Allowed” sign he may or may not have seen as a little kid outside his unbothered father’s Florida golf club. A winning storyteller with a subtle sense of irony, Halfon moves with ease through experiences past and present, here and there, trusting his powers of observation to draw readers in. Refusing to traffic in suffering, he makes us feel the horrors on a deeper level.
A darkly unsettling but highly readable novel by a leading voice in Latin American fiction.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781954276567
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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