A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.
Vizenor’s novel celebrates Indigenous culture and the cultivation of a sense of belonging.
On the White Earth Reservation, Truman La Chance is a young orphan who creates poetic dream songs to understand the world around him. Adrift from others, he finally finds a sense of belonging at the Theatre of Chance in his local community. The theater, a “curious sanctuary for runaways,” is the brainchild of Dummy Trout, a puppeteer who has not spoken in over 50 years, since the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, in which, at the age of 18, Dummy lost her family and loved ones and was consumed by grief. Decades later, following the Second World War, Dummy and her pet dogs preside over the theater, where she makes puppets and encourages the runaways and strays on the reservation to present stories to each other and the community. Over 12 chapters, the author uses the connections that a diverse range of Indigenous characters have to the theater to illustrate the building of a community amid the difficult circumstances on the reservation. Vizenor presents, in the context of puppetry performances, imagined conversations between historical figures such as Sitting Bull and President John F. Kennedy, Aristotle and James Baldwin, and Sacagawea and Tallulah Bankhead, which are the novel’s most intriguing feature. He also links Western cultural works, such as the opera Madama Butterfly, to the feelings and experiences of his Indigenous characters. The short novel is curious and winding and is at times hard to follow. But the author’s background as a poet is obvious in the lyrical prose (“He described the slight hesitations of his speech as the unexpected silence between a flash of lightning and crash of thunder”), making much of the language so beautiful that the meandering threads of the storyline do not detract from the reader’s enjoyment.
A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780819500427
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Wesleyan Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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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