Humor gives this stirring meditation on the nature of familial relations a playful, biting edge.
A man navigates childhood and fatherhood, first as an only child and then as the parent to one.
How does one be a good son? How does one be a good father? These are the questions that animate Moffett’s solo debut, a powerful and deeply funny exploration of how the things that happen when we’re young shape our lives. Moffett circles this concept during the novel’s first section, which deals with the unnamed narrator’s childhood in the wake of his father’s death. In the book’s first pages, he recalls how one of his classmates, Darlene, offered her sympathies, noting that her dad was also dead, though it was immediately clarified that, “He just ran off to Ohio with some woman he met on an airplane.” The blows are always dealt with a dose of the surreal, a wink and a nod toward the absurdity of life. The lingering trauma, though, makes its way into the relationships he fosters during the book’s most powerful sections. In adulthood, he’s a writer living in the desert outside of Los Angeles with his wife and son. Despite an awareness of his own shortcomings, he can’t help but have a tension-filled relationship with his son, one that mirrors his own angsty relationship with his mother. Big drama cedes to the mundanity of raising a child and growing into middle age. Little anecdotes, like how his son prays to Zeus instead of God because Zeus is probably less busy, give the story its momentum. At its core, it’s a novel of observations. Moffett does, however, give his narrator some catharsis when he’s able to clearly express feelings through a letter that he can’t seem to tell his son through words: “I tell him he’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Humor gives this stirring meditation on the nature of familial relations a playful, biting edge.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781963270303
Page Count: 216
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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