A kaleidoscopic collection that takes a sharp, dark look at family and how we survive it.
Childhood is the dangerous terrain of an inhospitable landscape in these short stories by Lima-born writer Adaui.
As two girls chat by a pool, the nearby adults think how lovely and relaxed they are. “They’re wrong,” the narrator says. “We’re practising how to endure everything life has in store for us.” In this collection, pain and misunderstandings echo through generations. Parents beat and blame their children and later demand to be respected. “You know why I’m so hard on you, don’t you?” a mother asks her daughter. “So that you’ll be the strongest of all my children.” In one tale, a family is terrorized by an unseen monster that bombards the house with fruit, their claustrophobic fear heightened by the suspicion that one of them is responsible. “Against all odds, we survived Christmas,” begins a story about a family outing to the beach that ends at a police station; “Not for anything in the world would I be one year old again,” the narrator says, “and live through everything I’ve lived through before now.” In another story, also featuring a harrowing drive, a young man remembers his mother telling him, “Getting through childhood is to survive the worst of all tsunamis.” Adaui's stories tend to begin in medias res, with much left unstated, the text only the visible part of a looming iceberg. Along with violence and threats of violence are rarer moments of appreciation and clarity. About the boyhood of one character and his friends: “It was a period when we cried seldom and felt a great deal.” An imprisoned politician with time on his hands finds solace planting trees: “All mornings repeated themselves in the only verb it was possible to conjugate: to wait.” In one tale, family history is arranged around locations on a map, “a fragmented story—none is linear—emerging,” a description which fits the book as a whole.
A kaleidoscopic collection that takes a sharp, dark look at family and how we survive it.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9138-6719-5
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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