A fictionalized memoir that is equal parts charming and dull.
A Hong Kong prep school student grows along with his peers in Hung’s autobiographical novel.
Fifteen-year-old James has already led a migratory life. When he was young, his family fled Communist mainland China for the safety of Hong Kong, then spent five years in Malaysia. Now they have returned to Hong Kong, and James finds himself enrolled at the prestigious La Salle College prep school. He arrives in the middle of the school year, his Chinese rusty, and his tuition waived on the understanding that he will run for the track team. His classmates are an assortment of students from all walks of life—Michael Sze, a native Hong Konger who becomes James’ social guide; Juan Chu Trujillo, who is Mexican and Chinese on both sides, and whose sister Julia becomes an object of James’ affection; Danny Tong, who experiences racism for his partial Jamaican heritage. The novel follows the students through the upper forms and into post-school life. The LaSalle Old Boys—as alumni are known—keep in touch, even as they disperse across the globe. Many, like James, end up in the U.S. and Canada. As James builds a family and a career as a surgeon in California, he always looks forward to high school reunions so he can check in on the developments of the LaSalle class of ’64. Hung’s prose is clean and leisurely, recounting the many characters and their particularities with the polite curiosity of an alumni newsletter: “Our most famous old boy was Phillip Chan, who became a popular TV star as a detective and later a movie star. He appeared in a few Hollywood movies, usually playing the role of a Hong Kong police inspector.” As a work of fiction, the book leaves a lot to be desired. There is no real plot or narrative tension, only updates on this person or that, all of which Hung relates as if it happened long ago. The book is more valuable for the portrait it paints of Hong Kong in the 1960s—a melting pot of cultures, settling refugees, and immigrants from across the world that’s fending off the looming menace of mainland China.
A fictionalized memoir that is equal parts charming and dull.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-535521-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2021
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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