A slim but often effective coming-of-age story set in a Micronesia of long ago.
Knight delves deeper into the origin story of his heroic Micronesian mariner in this third historical novel in a series.
Before his Odysseus-like sea journeys began, Ḷainjin was an infant in the arms of his surrogate mother, Helkena, on the storm-swept rocks of Wōtto Atoll in the Rālik island chain (now part of the Marshall Islands). As this story opens, his birth mother, the trader Tarmālu, has just departed the atoll with her sailors, hoping to move their fleet of canoes out of the path of a typhoon. The storm arrives and destroys Helkena’s house, but she and the baby manage to survive by taking shelter in a tree. Tarmālu doesn’t return after the storm, and Helkena is unsure of her fate; the latter does receive two visitors from Tarmālu’s native island of Naṃdik, however—one of whom is Japeba, the grandfather of the baby Ḷainjin. The men want to raise Ḷainjin on Naṃdik, and they want Helkena to come and help them. She agrees, hoping that, while she’s there, she can get her “lines”—the traditional tattoos of mature women—as well as a husband to bring back with her to Wōtto. Helkena is already a mother of sorts, but she’s about to embark on a journey through the complex, environment-dictated customs of Rālik womanhood. Knight’s prose is even and evocative, speckled with Rālik words that effectively help to shape the world of the novel: “The old mariner claimed he felt the island’s presence in a swell called buñtokiōñ, which fell from the north. He spent quite a bit of time trying to point it out to [Helkena], but its presence was too subtle for her to detect.” Knight’s interests are perhaps more anthropological than they are literary, but his fictional world is so immersive that readers won’t mind the relative flatness of the characters. It’s a short novel, barely longer than a novella, but the landscapes it inhabits are epic in scale.
A slim but often effective coming-of-age story set in a Micronesia of long ago.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77180-586-5
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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