A somber book about the formative, irreplicable experiences shared between friends and the agony and bewilderment of loss.
Writer and mother Mila, one of a trio of middle-school classmates who became close friends, reflects on their once-interwoven lives after a member of the trio dies unexpectedly.
As the book opens, Mila hears her cell phone buzz. It’s Citlali’s aunt, writing to tell Mila that Citlali has drowned in the sea in Senegal and her ashes will be brought back to Mexico. Dalia, too, has been informed. Mila, Dalia, and Citlali first met as preteens in Mexico City and stayed friends even as their personal and professional paths diverged: Dalia moved to Spain; Citlali settled in Brazil but moved around while working for an environmental NGO; Mila remained in Mexico. Stricken with shock and grief at the news, Mila agrees to help organize a sort of memorial service—she calls it a “leave-taking ceremony”—for Citlali. More information about the trio is revealed as Mila contemplates their individual and communal bonds, tracing the history of their friendship from its inception in junior high to the present. Two defining events soon emerge: an adult literacy campaign for which Mila, Dalia, and Citlali volunteered around the beginning of high school, and a trip to Europe to visit Citlali about six months after Mila and Dalia started college. Hindered by a low score on the entrance exam for her chosen academic track, Citlali had instead elected to take a job picking grapes in France, one in a series of offbeat decisions. Her private struggles are seen through Mila's eyes, referenced but never belabored; this limited context for her death feels true to life rather than unsatisfying. Translated from the Spanish by MacSweeney, the novel evokes the awkward process of growing up, chronicling adolescence and the transition into adulthood vividly and frankly. While their personalities and interests vary—differences that cause more than a few tiffs—the women share the love for embroidery implied by the title. Passages about embroidery and other forms of stitching divide sections of the novel, though any symbolic link to the events of the plot is not obvious.
A somber book about the formative, irreplicable experiences shared between friends and the agony and bewilderment of loss.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781949641530
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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