Agreeable enough, but best for completist library collections and diehard fans.
Miscellaneous writings from shortly before and after To Kill a Mockingbird made the author famous.
Taken as a whole, the works add up to pleasant ephemera. The eight previously unpublished short stories mostly plumb the same material as Lee’s bestselling novel: small-town life in Alabama, often viewed through the eyes of a child. In “The Water Tank,” a sixth grader is terrified that she might be pregnant based on misleading information from her much older, half-educated classmates. “The Binoculars,” “The Cat’s Meow,” and the title story also address with rueful humor Southern ignorance and narrow-mindedness, though the calm, reasonable father in “The Pinking Shears” foreshadows the counterbalance presented by Atticus Finch in Mockingbird. “This Is Show Business?,” a funny account of a favor turned into a day-long ordeal, and “A Roomful of Kibble,” about an eccentric acquaintance, are the only tales set in New York, where Lee lived for many years; “The Viewers and the Viewed,” a wry analysis of Manhattan movie audiences’ reactions to bogus film titles, is misleadingly grouped under fiction. The essays published in the decade following her novel’s success are standard-issue magazine fare: a rambling consideration of “Love—in Other Words”; a recipe for crackling bread with the sardonic aside, “Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy”; patriotic musings on “When Children Discover America.” The exceptions are a moving piece about the Christmas gift that gave Lee the freedom to write without financial constraints for an entire year and a touching but sharp-eyed tribute to her close friend Truman Capote. A 1983 lecture nostalgically recalls Albert James Pickett’s 19th-century History of Alabama; a 1989 essay written for an American Film Institute program praises Gregory Peck’s “inspired performance” as Atticus; and a 2006 letter to Oprah asks, “Can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer?”
Agreeable enough, but best for completist library collections and diehard fans.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063460515
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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