A striking novel of a changing New York City.
A young girl gets married in an attempt to secure her freedom from domestic drudgery in Rubin’s prequel to In the Hands of Women (2023), set in the late 19th century.
In 1879, Tillie Isaacson is growing up on her father’s chicken farm in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood; she’s the daughter of Sam and Sarah Isaacson, Jewish people who emigrated from antisemitic Germany. Tillie is brimming with intellectual curiosity and academic ambition, and her mother encourages her to pursue lofty aspirations. But her life changes drastically when Sarah suddenly dies and Sam marries Rebecca,who wants Tillie to abandon her dreams of attending high school to help her run the household. Also, as farmland dwindles in Manhattan, Sam moves the family to Sullivan County, north of the city—the beginning of the end of their way of life, which author Rubin elegiacally portrays. As Sam melancholically puts it, “Our farming world’s shrinking fast.” Tillie figures she can stay in Manhattan and attend school if she finds a husband, so she marries Abe Levine, an enterprising businessman who sells buttons to dressmakers. Her strategy backfires, however, since her home is prohibitively far from the high school, and the arrival of children brings precisely the domestic burdens she wanted to avoid. She comes to find the city a “vile place,” rife with squalor and filled with people who feel “faceless, empty of hope, full of desperation.” Over the course of this novel, Rubin thoughtfully chronicles Tillie’s indefatigable efforts to make her life livable, first by becoming a teacher of English, and then a devoted mother and successful businesswoman. The best aspect of this novel is the tableau it paints of New York City at the turn of the century: infinitely expanding and modernizing, while also overwhelmed by bigotry and misogyny. Readers will find the author’s prose to be unembellished and largely bland. Nonetheless, the plot is dramatically powerful, and Tillie is a memorably dauntless protagonist.
A striking novel of a changing New York City.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781685125813
Page Count: 358
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 8, 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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