A finely crafted work about the inevitability of aging and loss.
The death of a lawyer’s wife causes him to look back—and forward—in McWalter’s novel.
Conrad Burrell meets and falls in love with Sarah Bergman while she’s still married. He’s long divorced from his first wife, Megan, though he maintains a friendly relationship with her and her second husband, due in part to the fact that they raised his daughter, Madeleine, who’s now an adult. After Sarah’s marriage ends, she and Conrad marry, and it’s a comfortable, mature relationship that doesn’t cause much stress for either of them. Death is never far away, however; it comes for their parents, their siblings, and their friends’ spouses. Conrad can’t help but think of what would happen to each of them if the other died first: “Please don’t let her be a widow,” he thinks, watching Sarah at the funeral of Megan ’s second husband. “Let her go first.” When Sarah dies in a car accident, Conrad sadly gets his wish—but now he’s at a loss for what to do with his own life. McWalter’s prose is precise and fluid, weaving characters, settings, and timelines together in a complex tapestry with detailed description: “He met Megan Caldwell during the litigation stint; she had the carrel next to his in the vast law library on the forty-fourth floor, whose windows offered a distracting view of the harbor, Liberty waving her welcome, Staten Island, the distant curvature of the earth.” The novel is highly episodic, and as a result, it suffers from a general lack of tension; the reader knows exactly how and when Sarah will meet her end right from the beginning, and due to numerous flashbacks, Conrad’s grieving period only makes up the final third of the book. There’s something intangible in McWalter’s storytelling that keeps the reader enthralled, however, even absent surprises or a clear sense of direction; the novel offers few answers, to be sure, but it presents a depiction of life and loss that feels true, and seems to say that one must find satisfaction in whatever joy one receives.
A finely crafted work about the inevitability of aging and loss.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68463-077-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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