A companionable but disjointed tale about a man’s encounter with a time traveler.
A debut novel offers a tale of adventure and family spanning centuries in Portugal.
The opening of Reidy’s work focuses on Paulo Henrique de Silva Barros. Readers meet him in his 40s and then see his childhood, which starts in tragedy: His mother dies giving birth to him. The story then proceeds through his idyllic early years in the Estremadura region of Portugal as the son of a bank manager. Paulo’s courtship of Adrianna is likewise picture perfect until she’s killed in a car accident, devastating both her own family and his. Moving on with his life, Paulo becomes a project manager for an architectural firm based in Boston. He soon establishes his own firm in Lisbon, a short distance from his Estremadura birthplace, where he’s recently received an unexpected inheritance from his grandfather. The author prefaces the story of the rise of Paulo’s business with an episode set centuries earlier, in C.E. 410, that tells the tale of a man named Claudio Bracarri. Claudio is a landowner in the north of the Iberian Peninsula whose prosperous copper mines are threatened by the invasion of Suevi hordes (“Everything he had achieved looked as if it was slipping from his grasp; his very life was in danger, the storm that thundered around them a portent for disaster”). These two plotlines abruptly intertwine when Paulo suddenly encounters Claudio, mystically transported to the present day. This plot twist seems to come out of nowhere. The novel is comfortably settled into a captivating story of a man in the modern world building a business when suddenly it takes a hard right turn that isn’t grounded in the narrative other than that first introduction to Claudio in his own time. And this course change gets even stranger when both Claudio and Paulo begin seeking metaphysical wisdom from an older man who tends to say things like “After your universe was created from the massive explosive expansion of the singularity, the super-plasmic state of the singularity degraded as volume increased and pressures and temperature decreased.” This odd development ultimately derails the intriguing book.
A companionable but disjointed tale about a man’s encounter with a time traveler.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72839-839-6
Page Count: 206
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
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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