A flashy, astute read for knowledgeable lovers of American art history.
In the wake of his lover’s death, a long-time San Francisco art-scene insider curates her final words on the subjects of culture and belonging.
Marcia Lang is a force to be reckoned with. The only child of Jewish entrepreneurs who left Berlin just ahead of the Third Reich, Marcia has an indomitable sense of self that transcends her parents’ expectations that she marry, have children, and tend to her writing ambitions on the side. Instead, she becomes the “bossy, sometimes overbearing” center of a group of young bohemians attending Berkeley in the late 1940s. There, alongside a revolving coterie of artists, poets, and puppeteers, Marcia builds a name for herself as a keen cultural critic, deeply invested in the San Francisco scene. That is, until she commits the ultimate left-coast sin and leaves San Francisco for a career in New York City, where she becomes the kind of critic who can make an artist’s career by giving them “the full Marcia Lang treatment,” even if she’s tearing their work to shreds. Newly returned to California and predicted to be “the voice of the decade,” Marcia unexpectedly dies during the intermission of “yet another farewell tour by Martha Graham,” leaving her lover, Burt, himself a poet and publisher, the job of completing Marcia’s “coffee-table book for intelligentsia” about the postwar San Francisco scene. What follows is a pastiche of Marcia’s catty, colloquial, and piercing observations interspersed with Burt’s own more laconic takes on the same parties, happenings, and arguments. Perl, a celebrated art critic who has charted the course of more than one movement himself, provides an expert’s eye for the nuance of both the art’s making and its philosophy. However, as a novel interested in the nuance of a relationship between two people—one a firebrand who burns out too soon, the other left to navigate his loss in the wash of her immortal opinions—the book does not live up to the potential of its premise. Like Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve or John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time, Perl’s debut novel could be both an astute critique and an affecting Künstlerroman for the critic-as-artist, but the balance of the book’s attention lies on the side of criticism rather than character development; a missed opportunity that hopefully serves as a call for this insightful and often delightful author to try again.
A flashy, astute read for knowledgeable lovers of American art history.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781566897648
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
