A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen.
O’Connor’s debut novel is set in 1938 on a remote island off the coast of Wales and centers Manod, an 18-year-old who has lived there her entire life.
With her fisherman father, Tad, offbeat younger sister, Llinos, and beloved dog, Elis, Manod battles the elements on the rocky outcrop to survive. Following the untimely death of their mother years prior, she feels responsible for Llinos’ upbringing. O’Connor is careful not to romanticize the island, depicting the harsh living conditions in graphic prose: “The wind makes red meat of us.” Alongside the news of increased political tension in Europe, a beached whale captivates the small, tightknit community, which is becoming increasingly conscious of its isolation. That so many families have abandoned the island for the mainland, leaving “more empty houses on the island than inhabited ones,” increases that sense of dislocation. When English ethnographers Edward and Joan arrive to document the islanders’ way of life, they enlist Manod to provide her unique insight into the project, and she begins to wonder if an academic career might provide an escape preferable to marriage. This renewed sense of possibility and appreciation for her home—“I had never looked closely at the island. I had never thought it was interesting, or beautiful”—coincides with a sensual awakening. Where her sexuality before the arrival of the scholars might appear modern—she has sex with a local boy without shame—it’s strikingly passive: “saying yes to him, kissing him, other things, made me feel slightly less peculiar than I did.” Appraising the island and herself through an outsider’s gaze seems to awaken Manod’s senses, making her acutely aware of her body and desire. As the academics set about documenting the traditions, folklores, and lifestyles of the islanders, Manod’s sense of otherness increases—with the pair exoticizing the islanders to such a degree that their research is utterly compromised. O’Connor prompts us to consider what it is to experience ourselves—and our cultures—through strangers’ eyes.
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593700914
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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