Stirringly emotional storytelling.
A debut collection of short stories explores the lives of ordinary people with a focus on heartache, illness, and bereavement.
Fourteen tales are offered in this volume. The opening story, “A Prayer at the Sandbar,” examines the world from the perspective of a breast cancer survivor who is confronted by the sight of topless women during a visit to the beach. This is followed by “You’re Still Here,” in which a mother whose young, adopted daughter is experiencing night terrors reflects on her life and relationships. In “Something Grand,” a neighborhood church fire finds a widow facing the prospect of holding a makeshift funeral service for her religious husband in the school gym. Meanwhile, “Gravestones” is about a Jewish woman who volunteers to help maintain a cemetery only to find a grave bearing the name of an unrequited love. And “Purge,” which deals with self-harm, introduces a woman who decides to throw out unnecessary possessions. The collection closes with “Taking Notes,” in which a wife comes across love letters from a woman prior to going on vacation with her husband. Smith builds convincing psychological worlds in which her characters wrestle with life’s tribulations. Often the challenges faced are not immediately evident. In this emotionally intuitive, if bleak, assemblage, the author creates an atmosphere of unease by deploying hazy lines such as “Water can do that to me—erase the world around me and all my connections.” Smith discloses further information with subtle skill—for instance, it becomes clear that the narrator in “A Prayer at the Sandbar” is a cancer survivor when she ponders the reactions to her “saline implants, tattooed nipples, and scars on view.” The author’s characters are human enough for readers to share their pain. When Roberta Levine in “Gravestones” considers missing out on the love of her life, her sense of mournful regret is truly palpable: “Isn’t it funny how a chance comes once? Isn’t it funny how a person could not know that? How with one silly move, one silly answer, a person’s future could be determined?” Smith’s writing may not be for everyone, as moments of levity are scarce, but this remains an expert collection by a deeply perceptive writer.
Stirringly emotional storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73617-674-0
Page Count: 167
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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