Skillfully drawn, often heartbreaking reckonings.
Buried grievances, long-held secrets, and cutting grief simmer in the lives of Pakistani women.
Javed’s second work of fiction shares eight moving stories, each ending with its own kind of clarity, of “atonement.” In “Rani,” the opener, recently divorced Annie takes care of her grandmother, whose dementia has worsened after the death of her husband. Through their fractured conversations, Annie comes to remember Nargis, a maid who lived at her grandparents’ house when she was a child, and the unforgivable way she was treated. “Stray Things Do Not Carry a Soul” follows a young boy named Haider Ali, the book’s only male narrator, who, in idolizing his father, is forced to reckon with the realities of violence, addiction, and misogyny. While most of the stories stick to immersive realism, there are a couple of well-executed speculative moments: In one story, a woman’s dead twin visits her in a moment of suffering; in another, the ghost of an old, sickly woman’s lover appears to her in a glass bottle. The longest, closing story, “Ruby,” details the lives of 13-year-old Kaki and her mother, Rubina, after Kaki’s father dies. Rubina transforms into Ruby, becoming the vibrant, bold woman she had suppressed while trapped in a constrictive marriage. Newly free, Ruby and Kaki hide their Christian faith and move to a Muslim neighborhood, where Ruby falls in love with a man named Samuel and begins working for a wealthy widow named Tanya. Kaki begins to feel at home among these people, along with a new friend, Fatima. However, Kaki must grapple with the fact that this new iteration of her mother is a woman who primarily looks out for herself, and that financial security and friendships can shatter at any time. There are several chilling moments in the book—Javed does not shy away from tragedy and the darker sides of human nature—but the ending of this story is by far the most haunting. This collection is one to be admired, particularly for how it powerfully depicts Pakistani women (both in Pakistan and the U.S.) yearning for lives they have had ripped from them by patriarchy or prejudice. “We are catacombs of trauma,” Javed writes, “reservoirs of hurt.” Even so, these stories uplift the idea that we will all come upon an opportunity to be purified, whether in life or death.
Skillfully drawn, often heartbreaking reckonings.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781324111092
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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