A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.
Twelve stories illuminate the lives of Black women in the contemporary Deep South and Appalachia.
The vividness of the situations and personalities, the sparkling distraction of brand names and status details, the intrusion of technology moments like an Apple Watch pinging with a bill reminder at a funeral—all of these, plus a healthy dose of dark humor, act to make the full force of the dissatisfaction and anger that drive Hill’s debut collection slow to be fully perceived. In the first story, “Seeking Arrangements,” a young woman is on a Greyhound bus with an older white man she met on a dating site. Supposedly he “created Myspace before Myspace,” though she can’t verify this with Google. “He calls me his ‘mutt’ and ‘little hot thing.’ He says he’s only teasing. He likes to chat on Yahoo! email. He thinks I’d look good with a shaved head.” Now he's convinced her to travel 22 hours from Nashville to Florida to visit his mother in “a Presbyterian retirement community with gates that keep people like me out.” She’s minding his vast array of medication (he says he’s too ill to fly) but in truth has no idea what she’s doing there and fantasizes about running off with Lakeisha, the bus driver. The story “The Best Years of Your Life” is narrated by the admissions officer of an unaccredited university in a former Sears building, a woman who puts equal energy into luring student prey and excoriating herself for being involved with this scam. The people who come to her—like a weathered white woman who dreams of a law degree that will help her get her son out of federal prison—often believe they have received a sign. “That sign,” she explains, “is nothing more than cache cookies tracking their 1 a.m. Googles: ‘how to start over’ or ‘how to go back to school with a 1.9 gpa.’ ” This story is where the title phrase comes up, more or less as a knife in the gut. “You’re a good woman,” the “World’s Best Meemaw” tells the narrator. “Your kindness is changing us, we won’t forget it.” Other characters are tormented by pregnancy (unwanted, ill-starred), weight control, evangelical faith, screwed-up mothers and fathers, and police brutality and are unable to find the comfort others do in Pema Chödrön, nontoxic cleaning supplies, or White Claw.
A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9798885740173
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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