A novel that clocks in at almost 400 pages shouldn’t feel like a detailed outline, but this one often does.
In her second novel, Silver takes her protagonist—who resembles Ruth Bader Ginsburg—from a humble start in Brooklyn to the Supreme Court.
Justice Sylvia Olin Bernstein grew up in a working-class family, went to an elite law school at a time when few women were admitted, and built a career fighting for civil rights—especially rights for women—before ascending to the highest court in the land. In a memoir found after her death, our protagonist begins her story in 1949, when her father’s cousin comes to live with her family. Mariana survived Auschwitz, and her belief that the American system of laws—unlike Germany’s—could forestall genocide is one of the things that gets Sylvia thinking about justice. When the rabbi presiding over her mother’s funeral says that women don’t count to make a minyan, she begins to think about equality for women. When she’s at Harvard, her own pregnancy almost puts an abrupt end to her education. After this, fighting for women’s rights will become her life’s work. Although Silver has created a character of world-historical importance, she places her on a very small stage, surrounded by a very small cast. Almost everyone Sylvia interacts with will become a significant person in her life. This is a serious limitation that doesn’t work to the book’s benefit. And to be clear: Small doesn’t mean intimate. Even though this is a first-person recollection, Sylvia remains something of a cypher. Sylvia’s relationship with Mariana evolves over the course of the novel, but her husband, her best friend, and her daughter seem like useful accessories rather than real people. Most importantly, the author’s choice to eschew interactions with minor characters—her peers at Harvard, her colleagues at every stage of her career, judges at various levels of the judiciary—and elide years at a time make it seem like winning landmark victories for women and serving on the Supreme Court were not so hard at all for a Jewish woman born in the 1930s.
A novel that clocks in at almost 400 pages shouldn’t feel like a detailed outline, but this one often does.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593331088
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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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