An unusual take on the power of memory.
A Puerto Rican woman displaced from her home and her own past builds a surprising life.
Teenage Luz Peña Fuentes is happy growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1975. Her doting parents, Salvadora and Federico, are multilingual research scientists who provide their only child with a warm home and complete support for the lessons she hopes will lead to a career as a ballerina. Their love helps counter the bullying she sometimes suffers as “the tallest girl and the only Black one” in the ballet school. But a car crash destroys Luz’s world, killing her parents and leaving her with serious physical and mental disabilities. She has no memory of her earlier life—a small mercy in that she can’t remember the accident and, for a short time, she forgets what racism is. For the rest of her life, the few memories she can hang onto will be secondhand—the memories others tell her about, not her own. The novel alternates between Luz’s girlhood and her life four decades later in the Bronx in 2017, where her grandfather took her to live after the accident. He’s gone now, but Luz has a family circle to support her. Two of them are women who have cared for her since the accident: a lesbian couple named Shirley and Ada. Luz, Shirley, and Ada call themselves las madres. The rest of the circle is las nenas: Luz’s daughter, Marysol, and Ada and Shirley’s daughter, Graciela. Luz functions well in some ways—she married and had Marysol, then lost her young husband in another tragic event. She makes a living as an artist but still has almost no memory and is dependent on the other four women in daily life. To help answer Marysol’s longing to understand more about her mother’s past and her native Puerto Rico, the five women plan a vacation there—in hurricane season—that will be full of unexpected challenges and shocking revelations. As can happen in novels with narratives split between different time periods, in this one the chapters set in the 1970s are more vivid and engaging than many of those set in the present, which can bog down in extended passages of exposition. Luz’s shattered memory serves to a degree as a metaphor for the Puerto Rican diaspora and the lasting effects of colonialism, but the book’s core is its strong female friendships.
An unusual take on the power of memory.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780307962614
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
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
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