The title is half right: There’s lots of love here, but there’s not much story.
Central Park is a touchstone for the four New Yorkers whose perspectives shape this novel.
Jane is a wildly successful visual artist; her husband, Abe, is an equally successful poet and fiction writer. They have raised a son, Max, in a Manhattan brownstone. As the novel opens, Jane is undergoing chemotherapy, and readers will come to learn that she was undone by postpartum depression; that the adult Max isn’t at all like his parents; and that during a bad patch, Abe took a risk that could have capsized his marriage. The book’s roving point of view finds Abe, Jane, Max, and a fourth key character revisiting pivotal moments in their lives, during which Central Park featured prominently; in one of Abe’s chapters, which are addressed to Jane, he prompts, “You remember we were walking by the Ladies Pavilion in the Park when you said that you could not be with someone who would not put their art first.” Scattered throughout the novel are omnisciently narrated chapters that pay homage to the park—”a beating heart, an adagio, a dreamy parenthesis”—and its denizens, many lovestruck or lovelorn. The book is beautifully if unremittingly observed, which at times gives it the feel of an extended prose poem, and Abe’s narrative strands in particular can read like freely associated, strung-together vignettes. Ultimately, Soffer’s unimpeachable sentences aren’t enough to carry an unremarkable story with familiar plot points. (And surely at least one of the novel’s two artists would have suffered a professional disappointment over the years?) Romantics and poetry lovers may find their bliss here, but readers looking for a novel with a compelling storyline may emerge dissatisfied.
The title is half right: There’s lots of love here, but there’s not much story.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851265
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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