Runde’s family story is sweet, sad, and surprising.
A summer at the shore turns real for a family experiencing loss and love at the same time.
Margot and Brian Dunne, who’ve been married forever and are the parents of teenagers Liz and Evy, run a chain of rental houses in Seaside, on the Jersey shore. Former teachers, the couple worked their way up from modest circumstances and lead a life many would consider ideal. Brian’s tortuous descent into anger and oblivion—the agonizing results of a growing brain tumor—marks the course of an emotionally tumultuous summer for the family. Margot shoulders the burden of operating the family business with help from Liz and Evy, who are also continuing their own work: passing from adolescence to adulthood (with the attendant insecurity and heartache that process brings). While maintaining a united front to the outside world, the three women deal with familial misunderstandings and secrets, all now freighted with added urgency in light of Brian’s decline. Margot shares her fears and plans on an online forum, unaware that her internet-savvy girls are, maybe, one step ahead of her there. Liz and Evy don’t know what they don’t know about their parents’ relationship over the years despite internet and household sleuthing. Runde’s sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis is not without humor and insight: The brigade of well-meaning friends and neighbors who support the family with a never-ending supply of IDCs (Inevitable Death Casseroles) is just one finely drawn target here. An epigraph from Springsteen’s “Born to Run” places Runde’s account of abandonment, loneliness, and recovery firmly on the Jersey shore and among its yearning populace.
Runde’s family story is sweet, sad, and surprising.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982180-17-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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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