A devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant.
In this short novel by award-winning Croatian writer and theater director Sajko, a young couple struggles with parenthood, unemployment, and the anxieties of the historical moment.
In an urban apartment complex, a husband and wife are fighting again. He’s an unemployed writer and Dante fan, trying to protest government corruption. She’s an actress, now home with the baby. “Words, words, words,” he screams. She slams a door, waking the child. “There was no one to turn to for help, for support, for some understanding or a grain of optimism, because like they said on the news, and like he always claimed too, it will only get worse…” She’s right. Things do get worse. Yet out of this unlikely material, Sajko conjures a brutally honest, richly layered story about the fate of those caught in the inequalities of late capitalism and the inertia of governments. We see the actress “on the verge of a nervous breakdown while she was scraping burnt milk off the bottom of a pot, with the pee-soaked child trying to climb her leg, while she was begging the baby to wait, to wait for just one second, all the while trying with enormous difficulty to refrain from screaming or breaking something, because the child was bawling angrily and slapping at her thigh with tiny hands, demanding the right that every child should be able to claim, not to have to wait, just as he demanded the right that every man should be able to claim to pursue goals more noble than washing the dishes and wiping up urine.” Moving deftly between past and present, with evocative sentences that unspool propulsively, Sajko delves into her characters’ souls, and the title that seemed initially facetious becomes increasingly apt. Her compassionate attention extends beyond the unhappy couple to a neighbor attempting to grow flowers, a security guard, protestors at a political rally. And the child, absorbing this miasma of vituperation and crushed hopes.
A devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781771965989
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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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