A melancholy coming-of-age tale that grapples with profound themes.
In Kovach’s novel, a lost college student tries to find himself in Vienna but instead discovers the lasting effects of the city’s darker history.
After cheating on a history paper and receiving an abrupt breakup letter from his girlfriend, Alex Vogel finds himself alone with no clear direction. Despite his father’s protests, Alex uses his meager savings to board a plane to Vienna—a city his grandfather, who was stationed there after WWII, often spoke about, mentioning some vague connections to their family. Once in Vienna, he begins to practice his German and seek under-the-table employment, aimlessly wandering and striking up a conversation with anyone who’ll listen. Among his first encounters is the confident student Johanna, who quickly invites Alex into her world. Smitten, Alex accepts every invitation and opportunity to grow closer to her, including meeting her impressive, mysterious grandfather Heinrich. Alex begins working with Heinrich by organizing the old man’s notes and writings but is soon offered a more unusual task. Heinrich asks Alex to follow an old associate and record his movements, telling him only that the man “may be planning something unpleasant at a location in Vienna.” Weary of danger but too curious to say no, Alex finds himself exploring the dark remnants of Nazism and warfare hiding in plain sight throughout the city. With the story’s surprising turn to light mystery and suspense, Kovach flips expectations of the standard American abroad narrative and strives for something much deeper. There are plenty of funny cultural observations and moments of biting humor (Alex’s flirty repartees with Johanna or his mundane phone calls about the VCR with his parents stand out in particular). But Kovach is more concerned with more cerebral questions of history, place, and lasting trauma. His spare prose suits a dreary, stone-gray Vienna, where hostility may lurk under every chance encounter. It’s the perfect setting for big questions, but a morose and rushed ending makes the gloom feel overwhelming.
A melancholy coming-of-age tale that grapples with profound themes.Pub Date: July 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798990286702
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Parallel Grey Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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