An engaging read that has its moments but fizzles out before living up to its potential.
In this entertaining new novel, a ragtag group of misfits is on the lam after a fire breaks out on the meth-making commune in Oklahoma they used to call home.
There’s Ernie, who looks like a “hustler-Jesus from outer space”; Staci, bleached blond and burned out; Ray, Staci’s partner, roughed up from hard living and riding; and Coral, a 17-year-old Deaf girl whose half sister unceremoniously dumped her at the compound in a dented minivan. The four eventually find their way to Texas, where they settle down in a run-down house. As the group slowly grows into an eccentric sort of family, they must confront their pasts and the early traumas that first pushed them to the margins. Meanwhile, the threat of their debts and fears that the police will track them down loom large. Ernie finds himself more and more strongly drawn to Coral while she remains as elusive as ever. Ray and Staci find themselves alternately drawn toward and away from each other, each unsure where the other will land. One day, on the hunt to find a pet for Coral, Ray and Ernie encounter an animal that might even be better…and bigger. The introduction of the animal into the household intensifies the group’s already fraught relationships—or perhaps merely further reveals their own animal natures. The novel, especially the middle third, showcases Libaire’s capacity for truly stunning lyricism, but its inconsistency in narrative tension eventually compromises the strength of her writing—especially in the rushed, anodyne ending. Perhaps most disconcertingly, Coral’s character development stalls midway through the book, rendering her youth and disability merely ciphers that the more fully formed characters use to project and work through their inner turmoil.
An engaging read that has its moments but fizzles out before living up to its potential.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780593449431
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
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
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