Tender treatment of flawed but sympathetic characters compensates for a sometimes confusing storyline.
Politics and history underpin personal issues in a small Connecticut lakeside town in the early 2000s.
Stephanie Pearl’s mother, Ruth, has always been remote and uncommunicative about her childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Perhaps that maternal reserve is the cause of the “heaviness” that prompts 39-year-old Stephanie’s boyfriend to dump her after six years. Still reeling from the breakup, Stephanie isn’t overly sympathetic when Ruth freaks out that her neighbor is building a perfectly legal extension that will spoil her view of nearby Lake Topaqua. “It’s happening again. They’re taking things from us,” Ruth declares. “This is America, Mamma. Nothing like that can happen here,” Stephanie replies, words that will reverberate as Bush v. Gore makes its way through the courts: a backdrop to fraught interactions among a large cast of characters. Among them are Arthur Cantrell, a local judge who helped Ruth pull suicidal teen Ian Lima from the lake several months earlier; Ian’s guilt-ridden mother, Missy, Stephanie’s best friend from high school; Willa Fletcher, an attorney Arthur was dating but lately is just ghosting; Bill Cousins, the neighbor building an extension to shelter his elderly parents, and many, many more. The web of relationships gets hard to untangle due to a convoluted timeline that zigzags back and forth, alluding briefly to seminal events like Ian’s suicide attempt, then circling back later to explain their origins. Nonetheless, Poliner crafts a moving tale of damaged people tentatively trying to make amends to those they have hurt and to move past the traumas that drive their destructive actions. Alcoholism, failed marriages, parental rage, and closeted homosexuality are among the well-worn motivations the author doles out to her characters, but they’re well-worn because they’re common human problems, and her treatment is sensitive. Poliner doesn’t overdo it, but the theme of how the law can be abused makes for a sobering undercurrent to the characters’ individual problems.
Tender treatment of flawed but sympathetic characters compensates for a sometimes confusing storyline.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780063434530
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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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