A thoughtful, tenderhearted bildungsroman.
Returning to her hometown after college, Isabel must confront past characters and forge new paths and unexpected attachments to…skunks?
It’s the first summer after graduation; Isabel is housesitting for Jan and Steve, who are hiking part of the Appalachian Trail. She takes a part-time job as a receptionist at a yoga studio; she babysits a spunky 4-year-old named Cecelia; she goes on walks and coffee dates with her childhood friend, Ellie; she watches the three skunks that appear occasionally in Jan and Steve’s backyard. And she tries not to think about boys—namely, she tries not to think about Jan and Steve’s son, Eli, with whom she has a complicated past, and with whom a friendship begins to kindle. The arc of Isabel’s summer is cut by vignettes of the personified skunks, imagined by Isabel as possessors of a near-human interiority, exploring the natural world and the meaning of existence—pondering callings and purposes, self-realization, joy, death. These brief scenes gracefully highlight Isabel’s own existential contemplations: Does she have a calling or purpose? What does it mean for her to discover her own desires and aspirations? Are their discoveries really so different, in the end? Isabel’s postgraduate crises feel acute and authentic: “I was working in a yoga studio, and the people in Philadelphia were working in coffee shops. What made it more acceptable to flounder in a new place than in a place steeped with memories?” At its best, 23-year-old Warnick’s debut novel is strikingly, openly earnest, looking inward with thoughtful reflection and outward with shrewd but impartial consideration. Through Isabel, we see the thrilling scope of youthful possibility: cities to explore, boys (and girls) to kiss, friends with which to reconnect, skunks to observe.
A thoughtful, tenderhearted bildungsroman.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781959030614
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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