Dark, beautiful, and a little disturbing.
A woman adrift in her late 30s contends with a complex constellation of romantic relationships and their effects on her internal and bodily identity.
The unnamed narrator, a 38-year-old Ecuadorian woman, is at something of a crossroads: married to a man from whom she’s long been emotionally dissociated; technically childless (a qualifier that isn’t fully explained until later in the book); and stuck in a hazy reality divorced from meaning. For her, “anything that isn’t falling in love has never merited much attention,” and she spends her evenings in an adrenaline-fueled haze, drinking with friends at bars and warehouses. Soon, she meets an enigmatic filmmaker and enters into an all-consuming, meticulously described relationship. Though the contours of the man's psyche are never totally clear—he’s quiet, mysterious, and has a small daughter—the protagonist’s bond with him is profound, and for the duration of their relationship his house is a life-encapsulating cave, his bed “the bed of the world in its disorder and plenitude.” The relationship is simultaneously ecstatic and emotionally devastating, and when it falters, she has an emotional crisis, getting into accidents and meeting strange men while seemingly searching for a deeper source of meaning. As her sense of turmoil builds, she’s compelled to move to Spain to live with M, a poet with whom she’s carried on a lengthy correspondence. There, she must make a decision that encompasses the ownership of her body, her relationship to men, and her direction in life. In this English-language debut, as translated by Booker, Ponce’s prose is rich and atmospheric, and almost every scene operates on multiple emotional layers; this makes the narrator fully palpable despite the omission of certain biographical details. Ponce masterfully shows how despair and desire collide within one person, creating an entire universe of deeply felt emotional consequences. Though the plot is sometimes meandering—and a fair portion of the action is driven by the protagonist’s paramours, leading to an occasional sense of passivity—the novel’s searing exploration of unrequited love makes up for it.
Dark, beautiful, and a little disturbing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63206-330-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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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