A strong debut that feels timely despite looking back at a bygone era.
A family of Jewish immigrants struggles with the strict social and religious mores of 1950s America in Ende’s novel.
The Rosen family resides in their improvised 20th-century shtetl in New York City, a sort of mini-village in which all the members of the extended family live within shouting distance of one another. The family is organized around three sisters—Elaine, Rachel, and Helen—all of whom have young children who are close cousins. Though the family is secure, Elaine is terminally ill, and not long into the story she dies, leaving her daughter, Rebecca, and her son, Marvin, in the care of their pious, overly strict father, Harvey. Racked with grief and traumatized by a nightmarish childhood lived in the murderous shadow of the Nazis, Harvey is ill-equipped to raise the children on his own. The summer Rebecca is 14 years old, the entire family (minus Harvey and the other men, except for weekends) spends the season together at a house in Atlantic City, New Jersey. There, Rebecca—physically mature for her age and newly rebellious—is caught in a compromising position with a young man. Afraid of Harvey’s wrath, the aunts conspire to downplay the incident, but Harvey sees right through their efforts, and Rebecca and Marvin are left to absorb his rage and grief, which sets the stage for Rebecca’s eventual flight and “descent” into a sort of promiscuity deemed unacceptable by her conservative father and society. Ende’s novel is expertly crafted from the start—readers will quickly feel immersed in the small (yet also vast and complex) world in which the Rosens operate. The passages describing midcentury New York and Atlantic City ring with the lived experience of teenage years spent on the boardwalk: “The moving spotlight on top of the Ocean Avenue Wonder Wheel traced a path from the roof of the arcade to its base, briefly illuminating the wall against which Sal and Rebecca had decided to take their romance to the next level.” Drawn with no small measure of compassion, the realistically flawed members of the Rosen family are sure to stick with readers long after the last page.
A strong debut that feels timely despite looking back at a bygone era.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781627205580
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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