A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.
A queer Korean American artist interrogates the legacy and aftermath of Whiteness in the form of beauty, suffering, desire, and the complex interchange of power in this autofictive roman à clef.
The narrator of this lush and brutal novel is a study in dualities. Her father is Korean and abandons the family when she is around 10; her mother is White and loves her in a narcissistic, abusive way. Moreover, the narrator is a painter whose career centers in both the sweltering sunshine of Los Angeles and the eternal nocturne of Berlin, a figurative artist whose work underscores the complex interdependence of beauty, race, and power even as it nods to Western art’s tradition of “painting beautiful white women, the kind who always had more money, beauty and power than the painter”; and she is a queer woman with a submission kink whose “fetish for giving away…power [is] actually about controlling it.” After a period of relative stasis in her career, the narrator has two important solo shows lined up but finds herself without inspiration. Her search for a muse leads to Hanne, an LA art-world siren who initially attracts her with the proud, heedless power of her beauty and quickly becomes the focal point not only for the narrator's art, but also for the dynamic conflict between the narrator's own ideas about Whiteness—how it is “hard to paint precisely because it’s everywhere and in everything.…It’s the image of the world. And yet no one can see it for itself because there’s no such thing as an ipseity of white…”—and desire, where it comes from and who controls both its expression and its repercussions. The paintings of Hanne result in the narrator's first sold-out show, but just as she is poised to capitalize on that success, an influential Black performance artist publishes a petition calling for all artists of color to boycott museums and galleries with operating budgets over $1 million for their imperialist and racist exploitation of those artists, with the narrator's upcoming venues among them. Conflicted over the opposing impulses of her desire for recognition and solidarity, economic success and artistic authenticity, excellence and anonymity, the narrator spends a long, dark night of the soul spiraling around the splendor of self-destruction like a moth to a singular flame. Impassioned, wry, compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal point of her vision—building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears as if it has always been there for us to see.
A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781913505660
Page Count: 320
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
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
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