An affecting portrait of women’s lives both in cosmopolitan Beirut and in rustic mountain towns.
Four generations of Lebanese women, their lives spanning the 20th century, show a different side of that war-torn nation’s story.
“Is it possible to imagine life in Lebanon without violence, disappearance, and loss?” Asmahan al-Dahli asks in 1982, after she and her daughter, Lama, have moved to New York. They face an uncertain future, but having lived with a fractured legacy, through years of war, mother and daughter seek the peace and stability their foremothers could not find. Their family’s story begins during the years of World War I, when Asmahan’s great-grandmother Shahira survives a plague of locusts that causes famine. The fictional hill towns of Ksoura and Ajmat experience little of the war; families are more concerned with getting first cousins married (a common practice at the time). Shahira’s daughter Yasmine, for example, weds her cousin Ghassan. She dies giving birth to Layla, whom Shahira raises, their home becoming the family’s natural gathering place. Layla later moves to Beirut to prepare for university, where she falls hard for a student named Yusuf, who abandons her to follow his leftist political aspirations. She marries the much-older Salem, a cruel man who physically abuses her until Asmahan, Layla’s daughter, and her twin brother, Walid, intervene; Salem then verbally abuses Layla until her death. Occasionally, narrator Asmahan knows more than the reader does, as when Layla begins her affair with Yusuf and then, a few pages later, the narrative goes back to describe their initial coupling. A translator’s note from Hartman reminds us that author Humaydan seeks to eschew received notions of history and to tell the truth about women’s lives and the way women tell stories—not always in a linear manner, but sometimes backtracking, sometimes curving in tangents to emphasize an event.
An affecting portrait of women’s lives both in cosmopolitan Beirut and in rustic mountain towns.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781623715625
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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