A fabulous achievement, at once sweeping and sly, raunchy and richly compelling.
Over the course of generations, a house in the mountains of Catalonia bears witness to wolves, the ravages of several wars, witches, bandits, and the devil in various guises.
In an upstairs bedroom of Mas Clavell, an old woman named Bernadeta lies dying. Years before, one of her forebears traded her soul for “a full man…an heir with a patch of land and a roof over his head.” When the subsequent husband turns out to be missing a pinkie toe, she wriggles out of her pact with the devil. But ever since then, every offspring of Mas Clavell has been born with something missing. As in her previous novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2022), Solà is interested here in local folklore passed through generations, especially of women and witchcraft. The novel is set over the course of a single day, but narrated through the polyphonic voices of the mothers and daughters who have inhabited—and now haunt—the house. Hanging over all of it is a knowledge of evil, which some make deals to keep at bay and others invite in. Men feature throughout, both brutal and tenderhearted. But it’s the women—varied, critical, clamorous—who carry on the family narrative. Accustomed to horrors and hardships, they’re unsentimental and earthy. Only very occasionally are they moved. In one passage, a much younger Bernadeta witnesses her daughter dying in childbirth: “You can talk about misfortune, and you can talk about grief; you can talk about remorse and guilt, and about death, about evil and the things men do.…But you can’t say how a girl is made. There aren’t enough words to explain it, because you made her like dirt makes trees, and trees make branches, and branches make fruit, and fruit makes seeds. In the dark. From a place so deep within that you didn’t know you knew how to do it.”
A fabulous achievement, at once sweeping and sly, raunchy and richly compelling.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453438
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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