An ambitious if didactic saga about overcoming one’s past in order to build a better future.
A dispirited soldier learns lessons from a preternaturally wise carpenter in Zacaroli’s philosophical debut novel.
Danat, a young soldier haunted by his experiences during a war—one that destroyed his home and killed his entire family—wanders into a desert town and immediately spies a beautiful woman with a broken cart. Wanting to help her fix her cart but lacking the skills to do so, he finds the town carpenter and offers to sell the man his labor in exchange for him repairing the cart. The carpenter sees through the young man’s scheme, and though he refuses to help him seduce the woman, he does invite Danat to become his apprentice. The apprentice bristles at the carpenter’s oblique lessons, which seem to have little to do with his trade, but after Danat helps defend the town from a marauding army, the carpenter releases him from his service, asking him to help lead the townspeople to safety before a second attack arrives. It is on the final night before the apprentice and the townspeople leave that the carpenter—who cannot go with them—finally teaches Danat the lessons he needs to know. But will those lessons be enough to face the trials ahead of him as he seeks to be a leader in his newly chosen community? The novel recalls Coelho’s The Alchemist (1988) in its blend of folkloric elements—including a minimalist, expository narrative style—with long conversations informed by psychology and spirituality. “The fear that has tormented you most of your life is teaching you something very important,” the carpenter tells his apprentice. “When you learn what it is, the fear will subside like the floodwaters after a sudden downpour.” While Zacaroli does an admirable job keeping the plot moving, with a large cast of characters and sequences straight out of an action movie, the reader will nevertheless require a high tolerance for self-help speak to fully enjoy this novel.
An ambitious if didactic saga about overcoming one’s past in order to build a better future.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798822968530
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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