Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
An Orthodox Jewish soap opera, for mature audiences only.
Like every other wife in her Southern California community, Rina Kirsch is “the invisible hero of the relentless Jewish calendar,” and Emerson’s debut gives a dire, almost furious sense of the cleaning, cooking, hosting, and gift giving this entails. Usually when you read pages and pages about food and cooking, it makes you hungry, but here the long lists of ingredients and dishes evoke not pleasure but the repetitive, draining female labor involved in their procurement and production. The pleasure center of Emerson’s debut is not food but sex, but even there the pleasure sometimes mingles with revulsion. As the novel opens in June 2011, the men in Rina’s husband’s circle have decided to permit themselves an evening of wife swapping: “It’s a thing that people do. It helps marriages last.” The swap is described in the graphic terms that are a consistent feature of this intensely carnal novel; think A Sport and a Pastime for Haredi Jews, and get ready for sentences like this: “Sometimes at home he would beat off while thinking about beating off at class to his mikveh fantasies.” In any case, being “traded” for an evening to another man is for Rina an indelible, unforgivable betrayal. Nine months later, she begins an affair with a rabbi and soon after she meets Will Ochoa, the teacher of an evening painting class her husband suggests she take. Rina and Will quickly realize that what is happening between them is real love, the kind that requires you to read Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With the Blue Guitar” out loud during intercourse, the kind that can cause a complete rupture with life as you know it. The plot continues to unfold at a breakneck pace, including vehicular trauma, unexpected pregnancy, religious conversion, life-threatening illness, and more, as the brute force and inexorable rhythms of orthodoxy thrum continually in the background.
Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096530
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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