A compelling, melancholy novel that explores the beautiful rise and often violent breakdown of dreams, ideals, and love.
Mestre-Reed combines elements of a spy novel and political thriller with bleak, steely-eyed realism about Cuba in the 1990s.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of Soviet support, Cuba entered the “special period,” which was marked by a sharp increase in poverty, a lack of basic goods and services, and deep uncertainty about the future of the country and the socialist dreams it was built on. Mestre-Reed explores this uncertain time while also telling a story about Cuba’s underground gay and HIV-positive population. Rafa, who's come to Havana from rural eastern Cuba, goes home one night with a man named Nicolás, becoming entwined with him, his brother, Renato, and their mother, Cecilia. The family runs a high-dollar but semilegal restaurant, or paladar, out of their home, catering to rich tourists who seek an “authentic” Cuban meal, and Rafa helps them wait tables. Soon, he falls into a passionate and tormented affair with Nicolás that’s intimate and yet hard to define for both parties. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Cuba established sidatorios, or sanitariums, which were mandatory for people who were HIV-positive. The novel opens after Nicolás has been sent to a sidatorio and died, though no one knows where his body is. Renato also tests positive for HIV and is sent to the sidatorio but is allowed to leave on the weekends. Rafa and Renato are united in their grief for Nicolás but also in their aimlessness; they spend their weekends together, wandering the city, looking for tourists to pick up, and roaming without much of a purpose. After a fateful encounter with an enigmatic German tourist, Rafa learns that Nicolás and Renato had more secrets than he realized. Nicolás was a member of “los injected ones,” people so disillusioned with their country and their future that they purposefully infected themselves with HIV in a self-destructive act of protest. Now, this group is determined to overthrow the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit to Cuba. Rafa becomes a hesitant detective, more interested in learning about Nicolás, Renato, and himself than in stopping the violent uprising. In this way, the book itself reflects the slow decay of ideals Mestre-Reed is exploring in the story. The novel’s Cuba is full of dreaming, even delusional, idealists—whether it’s the bureaucrats running the state, foreign tourists determined to overlook what’s in front of them to see the picturesque Cuba of the mind, or erstwhile revolutionaries committed to any kind of change at any price.
A compelling, melancholy novel that explores the beautiful rise and often violent breakdown of dreams, ideals, and love.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-641-29364-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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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