McBride is a consummate stylist whose individual sentences shine far more brightly than her novel as a whole.
Two lovers navigate the legacy of an event that threatens to define both their relationship and their identities.
Readers familiar with McBride’s novel The Lesser Bohemians (2016) will recognize this book’s main characters: Eily, a drama student who turns 20 midway through the novel’s timeline, and her 40-year-old lover, Stephen, an established actor in the London scene who is currently directing an autobiographical film about his traumatic past. Told in interwoven storylines—the Now in which the couple dances around a painful conversation, and scenes from the past which has led them here—the book is narrated through Eily’s skintight stream-of-consciousness voice, which leaves very little room for autonomous perspectives. At times, this may render Eily an untrustworthy narrator, but her acrobatic, muscular prose lends such depth and nuance to the world she inhabits that the reader may be startled to resurface from the spell of her voice only to realize they are indeed in the same Camden flat watching Stephen eat the same cheese sandwich which he has been picking at for the vast majority of the current-time storyline. As an exercise in language, the book sings, illustrating the logic behind the many comparisons of McBride to modernist innovators like Joyce. More problematic is the way McBride’s investment in the immensity of Eily’s interior world is put into service of the plot. The event that has come to sever Stephen and Eily’s intimacy is clearly broadcast throughout the book, yet, when it is revealed in all its gory horror in the final 50 pages, it has very little impact on a reader already emotionally exhausted by Eily’s relentless telling. The freshness of the Modernist project to overturn traditional modes of storytelling doesn’t work in a novel that presents its climactic moment in a more conventional manner, as an epiphany, but arrives there in such discursive fashion that Eily’s darkest secret feels like reiteration rather than revelation. Not even Eily’s frank, electric eroticism can enliven the novel’s overwhelming sense of stagnation as it explores a story that has already been told by characters who have already lived, and relived, its main events.
McBride is a consummate stylist whose individual sentences shine far more brightly than her novel as a whole.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780571384211
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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