Taut, funny, and poignant; a tremendous debut.
A young single mother with a carefully guarded past reluctantly chaperones a school trip across California at the behest of her determined and curious daughter.
In 1989, 18-year-old Szonja Imre arrives in Los Angeles from Hungary to spend the summer with her married sister. In 2001, Sonia Imre dodges nosy PTA parents curious about a single mother with an unspecified background and a cagey demeanor. The how and why of this transformation is slowly revealed across both timelines, with excursions back and forth and in between, to Budapest, D.C., and California suburbia. When Szonja first arrives in Los Angeles, she’s surprised and a little disappointed by the rigidly structured life her once-close elder sister, Rina, has built. Now married to an Orthodox Jewish man, adult Rina has fully embraced the Jewish faith she and Szonja were raised to quietly ignore by their parents, both assiduously assimilated children of the Holocaust. As tension between the sisters grows, Szonja finds new connection with a boy from the Hebrew class she reluctantly attends each week. In the new millennium, Sonia’s daughter Mila has a plan: a parent-trap under the cover of a school orchestra trip to force her secretive mother to finally introduce her to the man who, she is certain, must be her father. But for Sonia, the trip is a series of minefields as she seeks to protect herself and her daughter from the fact of her less-than-legal status in America. Sonia/Szonja is a deliciously vivid character, her wry perspective revealing a character as spiky and vulnerable as the novel’s title suggests. Fabriczki’s prose dances lightly in a brisk, knowing, slightly aloof third-person present-tense voice perfectly tuned to its main character. Emotions slam in from the side, grief and alienation and the slow-dawning realization that “life unspools, one decision at a time cutting out entire alternative worlds, an endless series of bifurcations nudging each person into a life they have no way of knowing they will like or not.”
Taut, funny, and poignant; a tremendous debut.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781668091913
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
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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