An old-fashioned form and two lively modern women make for an enjoyable novel.
A book order sent by letter from Paris to Seattle turns into a flourishing friendship.
It’s charming to encounter an epistolary novel these days. The once-popular form has fallen out of fashion in the age of digital communication, but Fay resuscitates it, setting her story in the early 1990s, the last possible time when it could be convincing. The letter writers are two young women, Kate Fair and Frida Rodriguez, who even meet through the mail. Kate works at Seattle’s Puget Sound Book Company and is given the task of answering a chatty letter Frida sends to the store ordering a copy of The Face of War, published in 1959 by journalist Martha Gellhorn. "I was told I’m the only person here who’s perky enough to respond to you," she writes. Frida wants the book because, although she was raised in Los Angeles, she’s living in Paris with big dreams of becoming what she calls a War Journo Dame. Kate, too, wants to be a writer and has finished several novels without publishing any. Their correspondence quickly becomes a friendship, their letters full of their personal histories, current dreams, and romantic relationships. Kate falls for a depressive young novelist, while Frida follows a dashing war correspondent to Sarajevo under siege—and suddenly her letters become heartbreakingly serious, no longer lively reports on Paris cafes but stark descriptions of the horror of war. She returns to Paris, unsure whether she has the courage to be a War Journo Dame, but finds a new passion working with refugees. Back in Seattle, Kate deals with her own losses and discoveries. Their voices remain distinct in the letters, often naïve, self-doubting, or overconfident, but authentically the voices of young women finding themselves. The book spans several years with lots of fun ’90s pop-culture details, and it often focuses on food, from peanut butter cookies to chiles rellenos, with several recipes included at the end.
An old-fashioned form and two lively modern women make for an enjoyable novel.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852385
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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