Of minor interest against Laxness’ best-known works, but full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.
A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer.
Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland, though no one, rich or poor, seems keen on keeping up hygiene. As Salka grows up, she experiences all the unhappy turns of a Bergman film (and Laxness began this book as a screenplay): sexual abuse, violence, betrayal, suicide. And always the smell of fish. Sigurlína wants little other than enough to eat and a place in the Salvation Army, which figures strongly throughout Laxness’ four-part novel as the only anchor to which she can cling, though in the end it proves just as useless as any other. Salka, meanwhile, is born to rebel. On entering school, asked who Iceland’s ruler is (in those days, the king of Denmark via an appointed minister), she responds, “No one’s going to rule over me!” Alas, the volcano of a man called Steinþór Steinsson, Bluto to Sigurlína’s Olive Oyl, has different ideas: “When it came right down to it,” Salka decides, “Steinþór Steinsson was the devil.” There’s a poetry to Laxness’ depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship: “Out in the night, she had no Mama,” Salka thinks. “Out in the night was only the girl, Sigurlína Jónsdóttir, and she was not her mother.” But there’s also some jarring language, as when Steinþór berates a cleric for being the most contentious man he’s ever encountered, “despite my having had to associate with both negroes and sodomites.” The words speak ill of Steinþór, but they mark Laxness’ novel as being a century old, and on every page it reads like it.
Of minor interest against Laxness’ best-known works, but full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953861-24-5
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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
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
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