A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.
A woman maintains her independence and questioning spirit while walking the narrow “tightrope of obedience” required by membership in an insular religious sect.
Ruth Della Scholl is born into a Michigan branch of the Brotherhood, a fictional Anabaptist community, in 1963. With a strict, austere communalism, the group eschews materialism and competition and puts its members’ love of God above all else, but Ruth defies any stereotype of a fundamentalist. While other members come and go—including Ruth’s brother, whose disappearance is never discussed by their parents—Ruth tries her best to be a good Brotherhood “sister.” When a friend she’s made at a community college offers to help her escape the Brotherhood, Ruth is shocked. She doesn’t want to leave. Yet she scrutinizes every resentment and frustration she experiences, as well as occasional joy. With humor and barely suppressed passion, she describes her life from infancy through middle age through a very close third-person narrative. The novel is an accumulation of random moments: her distress when her 8th-birthday presents are packed away because she eats a candy bar her mother tells her to put down; the realization that the Bible doesn’t exactly describe the world—“leprosy still existed, pharaohs did not”; the discovery that a boy she secretly loves is marrying someone else. Along the way, Ruth sketches in an abundance of minor characters, too many to keep track of, from a young teenager who had to leave her previous community for “thoughts and deeds of impurity” to an older convert who rejects his former political activism as ego-driven. Ruth’s eventual marriage to an irritating but endearing husband rings all too true. Mothering her three children, especially the unruly son in whom she sees herself, is difficult. The Brotherhood seeps into every corner of her life, and readers will learn a lot about Anabaptist sects. But cheeky, inquisitive, and a delightful pain in the neck, Ruth carries the novel with aplomb.
A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780593715949
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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