A triumph that undercuts the conditions of its own existence.
It’d be reductive to call Row’s latest book a collection of stories about storytelling—it is that, but it’s also about the tropes and limitations, the willful deceptions and endless stretches of suspended disbelief inherent to reading and writing.
Introducing the main characters of “The Axe,” the narrator—omniscient, omnipotent, and jaded—suddenly pauses: “But none of that matters, because these aren’t real people, and it’s hard enough to hold onto your own memories without holding onto theirs.” Some of Row’s characters are aware that they’re characters; some of his narrators struggle against the constraints of their own roles. (“None of these details are accurate, by the way,” says the first-person narrator of “The Sliding Door,” midscene.) Stories that don’t explicitly satirize or deconstruct literary or literary-world conventions (see “Meditation for a Small Audience” or “Reading Group Guide”) explore storytelling, meaning-making, representation, in other ways: In “Late Blues,” two women contend with the legacy of a Black quiltmaker whose work was revered. In “Young Adult,” a pair of teenagers engineer and then livestream robot sex. Throughout all this, Row references Beckett, Lukács, Marshall McLuhan, and other literary theorists, but also seems to emphasize the ultimate futility—the tedium, really—of all that theorizing about something we seem unable to finally quit. We go on telling stories—in books, at the dinner table, to ourselves. This is implied by the very fluidity of Row’s prose: Even as he (or his narrators) perform a kind of ironic detachment—“As if what happens to me matters to anyone else except to flatter their own better judgment. The story is arrogant; the story is an elaborate inside joke”—you can’t stop reading. In other words, Row’s storytelling is masterful even as he tears down the very tropes that stories are defined by. Some stories are stronger than others (“Dear Yale” feels particularly bloodless), but as a whole, the book is brilliantly conceived and executed.
A triumph that undercuts the conditions of its own existence.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780062400673
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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.
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