A damning, if not wholly successful, examination of the violences of womanhood.
Short stories that expose the rages, obsessions, and plights of girls and women.
In “The Hot Girl,” the narrator’s best friend stabs her boyfriend in the leg in a jealous fit of rage, nearly killing him. In “Roadkill,” a group of restless and unhappy college-aged girls spend their weekends partying and taunting their peers; one night, they sexually assault a boy. In “The Ryans,” two teenage girls vengefully trash the room of their friend, Ryan, who has sold them fake pot. Escoria’s raw stories span from early childhood (a third-grade girl’s friend, Katie, wants to “play girlfriend and boyfriend” and simulates having sex) to adulthood (in “Hazel: A Diptych,” a relative learns about the life of the now-deceased Hazel, who was bipolar and was raped by her father and sexually assaulted her own son). All of Escoria’s characters seem to exist in the same fraught and relentless world—one rife with violence, addiction, partying, sexual assault. Many of the stories feature heavy drug usage: a student who tries meth before a midterm, a recovering addict who takes her 60-something heroin-addicted uncle to AA. Escoria highlights apathetic, almost sociopathic women—characters who, upon learning of a hated co-worker or fellow student’s death, “wanted to laugh but…didn’t.” Her stories are permeated by violence, both physical and emotional, and seek to expose the dirty underbelly of everyday, more peaceable life. At times, these revelations can feel refreshingly peculiar; in these moments, the secret pains of womanhood feel collective, shared. In one such tale, a young woman and her boyfriend wait out a storm in Brooklyn while in the middle of breaking up: “My heart was still pounding from the ride but also from the knowledge that this was a person fading, someone who was there in my life but also wasn’t.” But more often, the stories lack an adequate contextual framework, and feel unnecessarily—even irredeemably—cruel.
A damning, if not wholly successful, examination of the violences of womanhood.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781593767747
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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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