An observant and immersive work about a society in flux.
A White man recalls coming-of-age in the segregated South in Johnson’s debut novel.
Little Nickerson has lived in a Boston suburb for the last 40 years. One day, the septuagenarian gets a call from his sister, Allyn, with news of recent happenings in their hometown of LaSalle, Georgia. Municipal leaders have decided to remove a local monument to a Confederate soldier, allegedly modeled on one of Little’s ancestors, and replace it with a memorial to a local clergyman and civil rights leader. Little is happy to hear of this, although he’s concerned that the college professor chosen to speak at the event—a Black woman who grew up in the town—will be speaking out, in part, against Little’s own parents. The professor, Emogene Harrison, is the daughter of Bit, the maid whom Little’s family employed when he was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.As Little thinks back to his days in LaSalle, the novel offers readers a portrait of a Southern town lurching unsteadily from the Jim Crow era to the fight for civil rights in the ’60s and of Southern families who experienced very different versions of the same events. Johnson’s eagle-eyed prose perfectly captures the mores and frailties of his characters and their community, as when he discusses how a local Black preacher, by leading demonstrations, forced local White ministers (including the Rev. McAllister, the father of Little’s best friend) to address the issue of segregation: “For the Baptists, integration led to miscegenation….The Episcopalians and Methodists vowed to keep politics out of the pulpit. A few Presbyterians, under McAllister’s leadership, qualified as liberals—a relative term—and agreed to make mild gestures of goodwill.” It’s a subtle book, overall, and it seems less interested in making political points than in exploring the dynamics between its various characters. Although the story moves through well-trod territory, Johnson manages to bring LaSalle and its people to life in a way that often feels revelatory.
An observant and immersive work about a society in flux.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781958762042
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Arbitrary Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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