A powerful novel that will resonate with anyone who has returned to a place they no longer recognize as home.
A woman returns to her rural hometown after nearly 40 years to care for her ailing mother in Anderson’s intimate family saga.
On the cusp of 60, Cassandra Soelberg arrives in the small town of Big Horn, Utah, after a brother she hasn’t spoken to in decades demands she care for their aging mother, Dorothy, who has dementia. Having been forced as a teenager to give up a baby, Cassandra abandoned her roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and has been living a fulfilling life as an artist in Minnesota; she dreads her impromptu return to her childhood home. Interspersing flashbacks of Cassandra’s past, Anderson crafts a gorgeously descriptive narrative of aging, religious harm, and childhood trauma, complete with colorful characters who mostly eschew Mormon stereotypes. Through present-day Cassandra, the author offers up a refreshing depiction of older women and doesn't shy away from visible descriptions of age, from graying hair to sagging breasts. The story is also peppered with queer themes and characters, such as Cassandra’s third sibling, Matilda—born Matthew—who is decidedly not cisgender, though their exact identity is left vague. But the story shines brightest in its depiction of female bonding. Cassandra becomes a patchwork of the women who have left their marks on her life: Her grandmother Irene, who cast aside all the restraints of womanhood after the death of her husband; Elodie Linhardt, a worldly college professor who nurtures Cassandra’s artistic ability; even Toni Fuller, the Relief Society president, whom she initially distrusts. These encounters with other women, who rarely linger in the narrative yet become fully fleshed out in the space they’re given, are imbued with Anderson’s lyrical writing, which equally elevates the vast rural landscape, as in this speech from Irene: “Marvelous doesn’t mean perfect….Marvelous calls us to live on the earth, amidst the wreckage, above the mundane hours that tick on toward tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, toward that stifling heaven of a poor prophet’s wet dream.”
A powerful novel that will resonate with anyone who has returned to a place they no longer recognize as home.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781948814799
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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