As Simone creates collages from fragments of photographs, this novel delivers similar aesthetic surprise and satisfaction.
“Do you think it is possible to write a life of anyone? I doubt it, because people are all over the place.”
Burroway opens her latest with this epigraph from Virginia Woolf, then rises to the challenge, telling the life of a woman who is very much all over the place, employing an approach equally wide-ranging. In chapters spanning the years from 1940 to 2000, visiting locations in Belgium, England, and the U.S., using a whole orchestra of first- and third-person narrators as well as epistolary chapters, Burroway follows the trajectory of Simone Lerrante from orphaned World War II refugee through established American academic to Florida coastal retiree. We first see her through the eyes of one of the crew on the trawler that picks her up offshore in Ostend, Belgium: “Skinny as a rail she was, and her coat too small, though it was posh—velvet collar and that. I wrapped her up, and she says, po-faced, ‘My father arrives not. I arrive alone.’ She says, ‘My fah-zer.’ I knew better than to ask.” Subsequent chapters track her peregrinations from one short-term lodging to the next, gingerly homing in on the tall, slender, intelligent, and traumatized character. Finally we sneak into close third-person narrative, and at long last, first-person, hearing her impressions directly. But as her destiny unfolds and the threads of the story loop in and out, other characters and perspectives never stop grabbing the mic. Incredibly prolific, multigenre author Burroway is possibly best known for her textbook, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982 and still widely in use. The current novel might also be thought of as a guide to writing fiction, putting on display a wide array of techniques for portraying a character and unfolding a story.
As Simone creates collages from fragments of photographs, this novel delivers similar aesthetic surprise and satisfaction.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780299353841
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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