Rum’s nuanced approach to difficult questions of individual and cultural identity is refreshing.
Typical contemporary fiction about a woman’s journey toward self-knowledge and identity is enriched by the protagonist’s particular situation as the resentfully obedient daughter of Palestinian immigrants.
On the first page, Yara, a wife and mother approaching 30, announces her intention—and by extension, author Rum’s—to “reconcile past and present.” Raised in Brooklyn within a tight Palestinian expatriate community, Yara has always been torn, wanting to honor the history and hardships of her ancestors while resisting many of her culture’s prescriptions, agreeing to an arranged marriage but refusing hijab. For 10 years she has lived in North Carolina with her husband, Fadi, and their two daughters. Along the way she has earned a master’s degree and works at a local college. But as her life begins falling apart, she can no longer avoid the unresolved conflict she has always felt—the safety of obedience versus an inner urge to break free and claim control over her life. Yara’s central conflict revolves around her mother, a deeply troubled woman who, despite all-consuming anger and frustration, never considered leaving her abusive marriage. She always considered herself cursed and told Yara she was cursed, too. At a therapist’s suggestion, Yara begins a journal to confront her past, but the repetitiveness of Yara’s memories and her use of therapeutic jargon weaken the impact. More compelling are Yara’s struggles within her own marriage. While Fadi is deeply flawed, he is neither stereotype nor villain. And Rum does not simplify the choices Yara faces as a woman whose ambition conflicts with family responsibility. The couple shares a surprising degree of intimacy—showering together most nights—and similar unhappy childhood memories. Whether Yara can break the vicious cycle in which she finds herself is the question.
Rum’s nuanced approach to difficult questions of individual and cultural identity is refreshing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780062987907
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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