Haunting storytelling and a refreshing look at history.
Set in West Virginia during and after the Civil War, Phillips’ book takes as given that slavery was evil and the war a necessity, focusing instead on lives torn apart by the conflict and on the period’s surprisingly enlightened approach toward care of the mentally ill.
The novel’s pitch-perfect voice belongs to ConaLee, observant and loving but also a scrappy survivor. Initially, ConaLee knows only that she was born in 1861 after her father “went away” and that her mother loves books. When a frightening man shows up years later calling himself “Papa,” ConaLee assumes he’s her father. He is not, but he stays and tyrannizes ConaLee’s mother until she suffers mental and physical collapse. Then he dumps now 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and disappears. Here readers’ assumptions about 19th-century psychiatric care are tested. The asylum’s founder follows the real-life Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride’s theory of “moral treatment,” which included empathetic compassion on the part of the staff along with activity and fresh air for the patients. His humane approach was accepted, even prevalent in its day. Here, the asylum becomes the catalyst for characters to uncover identities lost, hidden, or unknown. ConaLee’s lineage, revealed piecemeal, exemplifies a complex world in which names change, sometimes more than once. Her mother grew up the daughter of a plantation owner. He disapproved of the boy she loved because he was supposedly “shack Irish,” the nephew of the girl’s Irish nursemaid. The nursemaid kept secret that he was not her relation but a slave’s half-Black orphan. Fleeing to Appalachia in 1861, the young lovers married under an assumed name before ConaLee’s father joined the Union Army. After surviving a head wound in battle, he lost all memory of his past and started a new life with a new name…guess where. Yes, expect coincidences and convolutions, but Phillips pulls them off with gorgeous prose, attention to detail, and masterful characters.
Haunting storytelling and a refreshing look at history.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780451493330
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
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