A touching debut that delights the senses.
In Hamm’s novel, a woman discovers a secret from her mother’s past in an old cookbook.
Vene Winstonarrives at her parents’ estate to comfort her mother, Olivia, during the late stages of cancer, but the reunion is far from emotional. While Vene is close with her father, Jonathan, a successful diplomat who served under President Harry S. Truman after World War II, her relationship with her mother has always been strained. Olivia didn’t support her daughter’s choice to become a doula or her decision to end a moribund marriage when Vene met her true love, Tony. Everything Vene thinks she knows about her mother changes the day she discovers a worn cookbook dating back half a century with notes on every page. They reveal a different side of Olivia: the passionate cook with a fiery heart, the woman ready to risk her position in society for love. Something happened to her right after the war, and Vene begins her search for clues driven by a burning question: “How did this woman who knew each spice jar, who was so playful and passionate about food, become her mother? Cold. Unsentimental.” In her debut novel, the author cooks up a fascinating love story, steeped in mystery until the final pages, spiced with mouthwatering recipes from Italian cuisine, the history of the Napa region, and the details of its winemaking practices (such as storing wine in caves built by the same laborers who constructed the transcontinental railroad). The mother-daughter dynamic at the heart of the narrative remains nuanced, complicated, and not easily reconciled. Overshadowed by Olivia, Vene never quite becomes a character in her own right (her husband, Tony, and 18-year-old daughter, Dani, make only brief appearances), yet her love and compassion for her mother underly the novel’s most moving scenes, such as the moment when, discussing funeral arrangements, Vene can’t help but blurt out, “I’m going to miss you, Mom,” and Olivia quietly echoes, “I’ve missed me for a long time already.”
A touching debut that delights the senses.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425296
Page Count: 248
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2023
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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