An entertaining and impressive debut.
A lightly historical novel about two friends and a quixotic theatrical project.
Lampo is 30, unemployed, living with his mom, hanging with his best friend, Gelon, and frequently torn between self-pity and self-indulgence. He’d work well in a buddy film, except that Lampo lives in the town of Syracuse on the island of Sicily some 400 years before the dawn of the Christian Era. For his debut, Dublin-born Lennon taps a few lines from The History of the Peloponnesian War, in which Thucydides writes of how defeated Athenian soldiers were imprisoned in Syracuse’s quarries. As Lampo narrates the tale, Gelon, who’s “mad for Euripides,” proposes to stage his Medea in one of the quarries, using the prisoners as actors. The obstacles aren’t small. The Athenians are purposely underfed and close to starvation. Lampo and Gelon are low on drachmae for costumes and backdrops, not to mention food and drink to keep their cast from that final exit. And attendance is doubtful since most Syracusans hate the invaders from Athens. Lennon initially dwells on the humor in these production struggles (Lampo’s squandering of food money on clothes, coiffure, and general showing off is a delightful episode). He traces Lampo’s growth in self-awareness while moving what seems at first to be a frivolous tale into ever darker waters. He’s economical with period detail and doesn’t shy from anachronisms, like “wreck the buzz.” His subplots bring pointed complications, including Lampo’s love for a barmaid and the usefulness of a wealthy trader. Exploring themes of friendship, loyalty, and the toll of war, Lennon evokes a time when it was common to relish and revere the art of Homer’s poetry and Euripides’ drama. Those with that appetite today are fortunate to have Madeline Miller, Emily Wilson, Pat Barker, and recently James Hynes’ Sparrow. And Lennon.
An entertaining and impressive debut.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781250893697
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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