An unusual novel that will challenge readers and keep them alert to how complex PTSD can affect people years into the future.
A woman’s early trauma spirals over decades until middle age, when impending divorce sends her on a cross-country journey to reconnect with her sister and their shared past.
Ruth’s red hair, freckles, and light skin often convince people she’s white, although she identifies as Black. She just doesn’t identify with her personal history. Even her attorney husband, Myron, also Black, and their nonbinary child, Enix, don’t know her true origins in California and their accompanying trauma, involving a sibling’s childhood death and her father’s murder by a police officer neighbor. Chapters from the perspectives of different characters, including Myron, Enix, and Ruth’s childhood friend Clarisse, who’s bipolar, slowly reveal background—not for readerly suspense, but to demonstrate how distanced Ruth is from her past. She and her family live in Louisville, Kentucky, where Enix attends an all-girls private school that they chose but now loathe. The author highlights constant microaggressions the family faces partly through the lens of Myron’s best friend, Anthony, a white fellow lawyer who tries way too hard to seem Black—and whose friendship to both Myron and Ruth matters to the deliberately tangled plot. After Ruth and Myron’s house burns down, she files for divorce and takes Enix on a cross-country car trip so poorly planned and executed that the teen chooses to fly home to her father rather than meet her unknown aunt, Wendy, in Sacramento. Whether it’s Myron’s skepticism about his new girlfriend, Paulina; Clarisse’s boredom with a psych ward’s activities; or the loving welcome Wendy offers Ruth, each character’s attitudes and actions resonate with authentic observation that speaks to the author’s dedication page which lists several dozen names (including that of Breonna Taylor) “and the incalculable number of others who’ve suffered and died under the heel of state-sponsored terrorism since the very inception of the state. And for their families, and their communities, and all of us who struggle to heal.”
An unusual novel that will challenge readers and keep them alert to how complex PTSD can affect people years into the future.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453544
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
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