A raucous, poignant exploration of the blood ties that bind…and chafe.
A 12-year-old girl, her mom, and their elderly landlady support each other through family separation, violence, and much kvetching banter in this warmhearted family saga.
Nicholas’ novel unfolds at the turn of the 21st century and centers around Maureen LeeRoyce, a 30-ish widow who waitresses and cleans houses to support her daughter Kalayla—Cambridge, Massachusetts’ most obstreperous 12-year-old. Almost as cantankerous is their septuagenarian neighbor and landlady Lena Barzetti, who lends Kalayla a helping hand and unwanted advice. Both have spectacularly fractured families. Maureen was disowned by her Irish Catholic mother for marrying Kalayla’s father Jamal, a Black man and a Protestant to boot; when Kalayla learns about the rejection (Maureen had told her that the maternal side of the family all died in an explosion before she was born), she has an emotional meltdown that Lena trudges in to repair. Lena’s own fraught past includes savage beatings at the hands of her now-deceased husband, the disappearance of one of her sons, and the deaths of two others in combat in the Vietnam War. Balm for the ladies’ wounded souls appears in the persons of Matthew Eccli II (called Mattwo), Lena’s high school flame, and his son, Rico, a 30-something hunk who’s next in line to run the family karate dojo and starts paying welcome attention to Maureen. Kalayla meets her cousin Kieran, which initiates a drift toward reconciliation between Maureen and her parents, and Maureen resumes her ambition to be an artist (with Lena’s help). But even as things seem to be looking up for Maureen and Kalayla, they must confront the increasingly menacing presence of Jamal’s mentally unstable brother Clarence, who becomes obsessed with Maureen.
Nicholas’ yarn is an engrossing look at families that unravel and must be painfully knitted back together and the knotted, traumatic histories that give rise to unforgivable sins that must somehow be forgiven. The author crafts sharply etched, vibrant, prickly characters who resonate despite their differences; Kalayla and Lena, in particular, are two tough cookies (as fiercely protective of loved ones as they are annoyingly critical of them) who have their own internal weaknesses that sometimes make them break. Nicholas’ portrait of Kalayla is brilliant—she’s a pitch-perfect smart, sullen tween, full of prickly attitude and rigid, juvenile moralizing dragged kicking and screaming toward adult complexity—all rendered in an adolescent’s crudely vigorous language. (“I hated that I felt sorry for him, hated that I couldn’t tell him he was a jerk and a butthole and a rotten uncle and a disgusting brother. I hated that I couldn’t hate him the way I wanted to.”) Lena displays a singular voice in her own right as she helps Kalayla figure it all out in her acerbic, exasperated dudgeon (“You don’t understand your mama at all! She does stupid things just like you, me, and everybody else! You’re the one who put her on the Perfect Mama Pedestal. She never belonged there. Nobody does”). The result is an entertaining saga about the wisdom that grudgingly passes from old to young.
A raucous, poignant exploration of the blood ties that bind…and chafe.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798218572617
Page Count: 377
Publisher: KDP
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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