A well-researched, politically urgent story that could use more vivid prose to match its ambitions.
Sex and politics collide in Halter’s coming-of-age novel, set against the tumult of 1960s New York.
Alice Kaplan is looking forward to finishing her studies at Cornell University when her father’s sudden death forces her to stay in New York City and help her mother. Hoping to make her name as a journalist, she joins the staff of a feminist newspaper. Her assignments, along with her debates with other staff members, draw her into the most important political and artistic movements of the late 1960s. She meets poet Audre Lorde and feminist Gloria Steinem, and she attends the protest before Richard Nixon’s inauguration. Alice’s consciousness is raised; friends and acquaintances help her understand structural racism and homophobia, as well as the horrors of the Vietnam War and the injustice of the draft. Meanwhile, her personal life is tumultuous—her college boyfriend, Pete, turns out to be a rat; her oldest friend, Darlene, falls in with some criminals; and she struggles to forge an adult relationship with her mother. At home and out in the world, Alice must absorb these new experiences and decide what she stands for as a writer, an activist, and a woman. Her journeys through the counterculture are thorough and illuminating; she engages with the major political movements of the day via lively characters who clearly articulate their travails and aspirations: “If you swallow tyrannies day by day,” Lorde says, “you sicken and die.” The novel is especially adept at outlining the challenges of intersectional feminism and identifying the misogyny embedded in the antiwar movement and leftist politics. Halter’s depictions of abortion and rape culture are refreshingly frank and realistic, and all too timely. The depiction of the era does lack some hoped-for sensory detail; the dialogue can read as flat and pro forma, in contrast to the depth of Alice’s character and her evolving inner life.
A well-researched, politically urgent story that could use more vivid prose to match its ambitions.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781578692316
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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