Head-on against the grim indignities of an unequal world, Falero’s poetic novel embraces humor and empathy.
A look at poverty and ambition in Brazil.
The title characters begin this vibrant and punchy novel (Falero’s first to be translated into English) as stock workers at a Porto Alegre supermarket. The ball gets rolling when Pedro—the bookish smooth talker of the pair—takes “stock of the world around him” and realizes that all his problems have one solution: money. Meanwhile, Marques—more demure and gruff— is repeatedly “zapped” by “the stinger of self-hatred” as he imagines the meager life in store for his children. He, too, resolves to escape poverty. In a long-winded and entertaining dialogue, Pedro primes Marques on socialism (“The guy was called Marques, like me?” “No. Marx, with the letter ex”), convincing him they deserve a little comfort and luxury—even if comfort and luxury mean breaking a few bourgeois laws. Everyone has “to choose between being a thug or a slave,” Pedro says more than once. But once they hatch a scheme to finally move up in the world, the two friends spend the duration toeing that line, eager to attain power and dignity without betraying their values. Falero tells this story in delightful prose. Meandering sentences and wry repetitions breathe personality into the characters’ inner lives, and the landscape of Porto Alegre’s slums is rendered with forlorn affection. Occasional metaphors sing: Pedro is at one point “so tired he felt soft like butter”; we see one character’s “sorrow brim over and touch” another. Through Falero’s lovable characters, readers will meditate on violence and respectability within the death-trap of runaway capitalism. “When reality walks through the door,” he warns, “there isn’t a single smile that doesn’t fly out the window.
Head-on against the grim indignities of an unequal world, Falero’s poetic novel embraces humor and empathy.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781662601231
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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