Sometimes-profound tales featuring colorful imagery and accessible characters.
Seemingly simple lives are full of surprises in Feingold’s collection of short stories.
Music student Dakota, in the opening title story, ignores her sister’s warning about her too-fast relationship. She moves in with Zayden, a real estate developer who certainly seems like an ambitious, responsible older man, after just a few dates. Things change drastically after Dakota unearths what’s hiding in her boyfriend’s home office. Similarly, in “Avram's Miracle,” hopeful new business partners tour the world’s biggest matzah bakery, which is in Cincinnati. They’re gunning for “worldwide matzah domination” but are unexpectedly taken aback by apprentice baker Avram’s invention. This impressive device may be able to feed masses for free, but is that really what these food industrialists want? Many readers will relate to the lives of those in the seven tales herein: an aging man pining for youth in “The Mirror” and a woman long denying her own very real mental condition in“The Loneliest Number.” Still, surreal moments intermittently crop up. In “The Box,” for example, a stranger hands the titular item to art professor Francine, who’s sitting alone at a restaurant. “For happiness,” the nameless woman tells her before quickly departing. The wooden box’s glass top periodically glows with pictures of people with whom Francine has recently conversed, but she’s not immediately clear why it does so. This story, like the others, showcases the effects of unpredictable happenings on everyday lives.
Feingold develops a series of sublime characters in these tales. Irina in “The Loneliest Number,” for instance, regularly sees a therapist but, for at least a couple of years, preferred that her doctor never mention her diagnosed bipolar disorder; Irina is also a classical pianist who sees colors in music and calms herself down by running through names of dead celebrity women who also suffered from bipolar disorder. Religion, especially Judaism, is a common theme that further grounds the stories in real life; in “Rich Girl,” accountant David, for example, belongs to a Jewish family that’s becoming less devout with each passing generation. A few characters pop up in more than one tale, including zany wife and husband Mary and Phil. As a supporting character, Mary offers telephonic advice to one of her sisters while simultaneously dominating an argument with her mostly ineffectual spouse. They lead their own story in the collection’s last and shortest offering, “There Is No Death in Finding Nemo,” which finds them in their weirdest squabble yet. Feingold’s concise prose generates succinct narratives and vivid images; Francine even sees memorable sights on a dating app, such as a “grizzled man in a plaid flannel shirt, sitting on the hood of his red pickup truck, flashing a yellow smile.” Other narrative details are often clever or playful, as when David goes to see his grandfather, who has dementia, in a Boston nursing home; their dialogue is intercut with a movie playing on TV—effectively fostering the impression that Rock Hudson and Doris Day are part of the conversation.
Sometimes-profound tales featuring colorful imagery and accessible characters.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781991581922
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Impspired Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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.
