A rumination on a life that could have been, this novel encapsulates queer history often left untold.
Decades after a collegiate romance, a woman looks back at the pivotal Sapphic encounter of her youth.
It's winter 1944 in London, and Bettina, known as Red—thanks to her fiery hair color—has a crush on Mara. Newly enrolled at the Horsham Science College, where Red studies zoology, the elegant, married Mara easily accepts Red’s invitation to partner in a cat dissection. An infatuation grows, Mara invites Red to her impressive flat to bathe, leading to Red’s first run-in with Mara’s gruff husband, Karl. Similarly to many casually coupled-up women they observe at the height of World War II, neither Mara nor Red sees any appeal in the opposite sex, longing only for each other. When Karl departs to Europe for business, the two women are free to explore their enchantment with each other, immediately becoming domestic partners and, as they both recognize out loud, lesbians. Since the story is presented as a reminiscence of “Mara's winter” by an older, married Red, who remembers this season, “its substance, the wrench of its happiness like a pain, an ecstasy,” the reader knows the couple is doomed early on. Still, the progression of their intimate connection, interwoven with Red’s coming-of-age, is entertaining. When Red visits her single Aunt Muriel for Christmas, Red’s ex-lover, Rhoda, is also invited, since she was included in past celebrations as a dear friend and roommate. The faux-friend trope rings true, as do, perhaps sadly, several others, as Red’s story offers peeks into several versions of not-so-covert lesbian life in the 1940s. “We agreed that each human being was both male and female, and anyone who denied both sides in themselves was lying,” Red and Mara conclude at the height of their romance. For the contemporary reader, this novel, originally published in 1962, feels like an astute observation on how compulsory heterosexuality has impacted and stifled society for generations.
A rumination on a life that could have been, this novel encapsulates queer history often left untold.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-946022-25-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: McNally Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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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