An overwrought scaffolding draped with undercooked prose. Maybe if you really love du Maurier...
The author of a Daphne du Maurier knockoff is asked to ghostwrite another du Maurier–adjacent story.
As Cantor, author of the Gatsby-inspired Beautiful Little Fools (2022), notes in her acknowledgments, “In many ways this novel is extremely meta, but what is more so than a fiction writer who just wrote a retelling, writing a novel about a fiction writer…who just wrote a retelling?” Actually, it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. Olivia Fitzgerald, struggling author of an unsuccessful book called Becky based on du Maurier’s classic Rebecca (“The death knell was the Kirkus review…calling Becky ‘a shoddy, ridiculous knockoff’ ”), is hired to write yet another version of the gothic romance by a hot, reclusive mega-billionaire who claims du Maurier stole his late grandmother’s life story. The chapters that unfold Olivia's trip to California to meet with Henry Asherwood are interspersed with excerpts from what seems to be yet another version of the story, titled The Wife; by whom it was written is unclear. There are also echoes of the Rebecca story arc in Ash’s own life. Everywhere you look, it seems, there are dead wives, unfriendly housekeepers, fires, and the sentence “Last night I dreamt I went to Malibu again,” which is clever but five repetitions seem like a lot. Our path through this house of mirrors is the burgeoning, quasi-forbidden romance between Ash (twice named People’s Sexiest Man Alive) and Olivia (“average-looking, curly-haired Jewish girl from suburban Connecticut”), unfurled in such a perfunctory and silly way that it’s possibly supposed to be funny. “Then I tried the scone—simultaneously spicy and sweet and unlike anything I’d tasted before. Unusual but intoxicating. Almost like Ash himself.” LOL. The clear point of the exercise is that literary retellings are not thievery—Rebecca itself can be seen as a retelling of Jane Eyre—but at a certain point one wonders if there's any reason to tell this story so many times.
An overwrought scaffolding draped with undercooked prose. Maybe if you really love du Maurier...Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780778334187
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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