Hedman's descriptions delight, but interest wanes as her characters perform the same poses again and again.
Three friends consider whether there's anything wrong with needing another person.
As Hedman's debut opens, Frances, the daughter of Thora and August, calls Hugo, her mother’s former friend, an expatriate Swede teaching in New York, and asks to meet. The novel then jumps back in time, finding Hugo, who's in college in Stockholm, living in the apartment of Thora’s parents, members of the wealthy and morally dubious Stiller family. There, he meets Thora and August, inseparable friends since childhood. August is charming, his mood setting the tone of conversations, while Thora is often contrarian. Hugo is instantly enamored with both, admiring how they combine “ease” and “vulnerability.” Thora and August’s relationship is natural to them and an enigma to others: They are physically intimate but not exclusive. Thora defends their closeness by saying: “There’s nothing wrong with needing other people.” This philosophy is challenged when she develops feelings for Hugo, who has trouble distinguishing his emotions from the facade he projects for others. August, the lone member of the trio who doesn’t narrate, is sincere yet opaque; we learn about him through his confessions to the others. Each is on the cusp of choosing a career, engaged in the surrealism of playacting adulthood. The language is often pleasantly surprising, as when Thora says, “I liked the way the real world crackled when filtered through the legal method,” or conversation “moved forward by way of tender linguistic abuses.” But as Hugo and Thora continue to falter on the question of who they are—with Hugo feeling that “everything was a pose” and Thora thinking “every single adjective could be used to describe her, and they’d all be equally true and untrue”—the tension behind their listlessness falters.
Hedman's descriptions delight, but interest wanes as her characters perform the same poses again and again.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781609459529
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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