A creative, if thinly veiled, collection that catalogs misgivings about society.
A collection of speculative poems that blends folklore with social commentary.
Binkley explores the tension between otherworldly beings and humans in this book. She provides lexical and historical background on the term “faery,” which is not necessarily the tiny winged creature of popular culture. The first poem’s speaker recounts reading so voraciously that “the volumes would disembody / themselves with exhaustion.” In “The Parapet,” another speaker is chastised by a jeering crowd of people who believe anyone who is alive and awake “is an enormous threat and security issue.” A seamstress speaks truth to power, telling a king and courtiers that they cling to old ideas and too easily dismiss innovative thinkers in “The Visitor in Almost Linen.” “Exactly” tells a tale about how girls were “tricked into heartbreak” so their love “could be sold as liquor in the / faery bars.” In “A Letter Home,” a fairy complains to her sister about how mortals misuse time. An oracle feels burdened by her gift and laments that other girls must suffer the same fate in “Again.” An elderly fairy insists that one must define their identity in “The Old Woman.” In “Parched,” a naiad becomes exasperated when a thirsty man asks her to take him to a deep well and fails to comprehend that she is the source of water. The final poem, “Nights Breathe,” acknowledges that even mortals can occasionally recognize magic in the world. Binkley’s interpretation of humanity through these supernatural perspectives is unique. She uses evocative imagery when describing “a sigh which sounded like an echo in a cave against a body of water” or how “color filled the sky, so pastel and textured as an / easter cardigan.” However, some of the poems are so abstract that they are nearly indecipherable: “I bathe in solutions again which is my habit / more than I bathe in water / to rinse off in magic 8 ball juice.” Readers may grow weary of the speakers’ bitter tone or enjoy a gimlet-eyed view of life’s frustrations.
A creative, if thinly veiled, collection that catalogs misgivings about society.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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