An endlessly immersive and at times awe-inspiring middle volume of a postmodern epic.
Rogers continues his lengthy account of a fictional journalist and her fictional island in his second literary novel in a trilogy, following Sailing to Noon (2023).
The island of Canuba lies in the Caribbean Sea, due south of Puerto Rico. Although it’s somewhat bigger than its more famous neighbor, the average reader might be forgiven for never having heard of it—indeed, one might think “there’s a worldwide conspiracy to keep Canuba off the map.” Long ruled by foreign powers and native autocrats, it’s most notable for “rum, baseball, sugar, beaches, and easy sex”; its own form of dance, the cambuca; and as the chosen home of Sicilian-born, Princeton University-educated journalist Chiara Trigona. The protagonist of Rogers’ previous novel, she appears in this one as the addressee of monologues by five people who loved her over the years. There’s the boisterous, ribald Lamia Metaxa, once Canuba’s premier cellist, as well as one of its most prolific lovers, who now, in the aftermath of a mental breakdown that ruined her career, recounts her years as Chiara’s closest friend and sometimes inamorata. There are the three Miranda brothers, the sons of a prominent diplomat: Virgilio, a world-renowned painter who pined after Chiara for years and who turned his own self-destruction into his artistic opus; Horacio, a sesquipedalian composer who rhapsodized Chiara in high literary style and eventually became a monk; and Catulo, a choreographer who had a fling with Chiara in college, although he was primarily interested in men. Then there’s Amado, Chiara’s plainspoken paramour whose death cast a shadow on the rest of her life—although it doesn’t prevent him from breaking into other people’s narration from time to time to say his piece.
Rogers’ novel takes the form of four long chapters, each of which moves backward in time by section toward the moment when the speaker first met Chiara. The time and place of the telling is somewhat mysterious—it turns out that Amado isn’t the only narrator who’s shuffled off this mortal coil—and each speaker is given to digressions about art, history, and politics with only a thin connection to their Sicilian muse. Even so, the author renders each voice with such specificity and vivacity that readers will be content to accompany them through whatever territory they wish. One section of Virgilio’s monologue takes the form of a 13-page poem, narrating Chiara’s trip after drinking a hallucinogenic tea; in another, Lamia’s synesthesia causes her to imagine her cello metamorphosing into a giant penis, mid-performance. The sharpest writing is often the most direct, as when Chiara gazes out at the ocean and says to Lamia, “I’m grateful to you for this sea. Yes, it’s a gift from you. I’m still in love with the fickle Caribbean, in all its varied moods. On sunny days like today, it’s a thousand tones of blue and green, from midnight to aquamarine.” Canuba may not be real, but in Rogers’ evocation of its history, its art, and its denizens, he captures something of the irrepressible invention and intoxication of Caribbean culture. An endlessly immersive and at times awe-inspiring middle volume of a postmodern epic.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781963908794
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
