Potentially of some interest to architecture buffs, not so much to fiction readers.
Very lightly fictionalized life of a Spanish-born architect who had his greatest success in the U.S.
We meet Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908) on May 11, 1881, when, barely a month after their arrival in New York, his 9-year-old son, Rafael Jr., watches as his mother tells her philandering mate she’s going back to Barcelona. The adult Rafael Jr. is designing the dome of St. John the Divine as he begins his recollections of his father’s complicated personal and professional lives, which include two marriages (neither of them to Rafael Jr.’s mother) and some simultaneous affairs. “I could not be without a woman in my life,” Guastavino tells his son to excuse his various infidelities, which are so poorly managed that he’s inevitably found out. He’s equally feckless in his financial affairs, going bankrupt on several occasions despite a growing reputation based on his innovative vault designs, which are fireproof and lighter than anything American architects have seen. Rafael Jr. was intimately involved in his father’s work even before he left school at 15 to apprentice in the business, and his descriptions of Guastavino’s contributions to the Boston Public Library, the Grand Central Oyster Bar, Manhattan’s City Hall subway station, Boston’s Christian Science mother church, and other iconic buildings are the most engaging parts of the book. The stop-and-start way readers learn about Guastavino’s past, which mirrors the way Rafael Jr. pried the details from his secretive father, is one of the few reasons to consider this a novel, along with the son’s less-than-riveting musings on how their relationship evolved over time. Moro’s previous book along these lines, a “dramatized biography” of Sonia Gandhi called The Red Sari, prompted an official protest from the Indian National Congress party after it was published in Spain in 2008; this slow-moving successor is unlikely to stir that much attention.
Potentially of some interest to architecture buffs, not so much to fiction readers.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781640097469
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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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