Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.
Honey can be a salve or a sweetener but, as Han illustrates so vividly, not all wounds can be healed by the oft-employed Korean folk remedy.
Han explores the dehumanizing practice of sexual enslavement in a narrative that employs realism of both the stark and the magical kind as she follows several generations of Korean women through perilous times. Beginning with the story of twins, Geum-Ja, a girl, and Geum-Jin, a boy, born in a mountainous region of Korea in 1902, Han traces the increasingly malignant effects of Japanese occupation. Thirteen-year-old Geum-Ja, who mysteriously disappears from the family’s compound one night, assumes the form of a tiger and exerts power and protection over her family in that guise. Geum-Jin grows up in her absence and goes on to get married and father three children, but his family is brutalized by Japanese soldiers in a raid on their home in 1931. The only apparent survivor is his daughter Song Young-Ja, whose heartbreaking story forms the core of the saga. A childless couple opens their home to Song Young-Ja but she is molested by the husband and then sent away by the wife. A demeaning job in a teahouse—a hotbed of gossip and espionage—evolves over time. Still, Song Young-Ja’s constrained but relatively safe existence comes to a cruel end in 1941 when she is captured by Japanese soldiers and transported to a camp where women serve as sex slaves. Her experiences are brutally recounted in corrosive detail. Song Young-Ja subversively employs her own supernatural ability to incorporate her emotional state into the foods she prepares but still suffers incalculable harm. Decades pass before the injuries suffered by the enslaved women are publicly acknowledged. It is with the aid of Song Young-Ja’s young granddaughter—who harbors a mysterious ability of her own—that she begins to confront her past. Han has incorporated extensive research into a revelatory work of harrowing fiction.
Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781668202166
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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