Granular yet transcendent storytelling.
Eleven searingly alive stories about Black men and women from West Texas explore the ways remorse and resentment can coexist in secrecy.
The opening story, “The Mother,” carries an emotional wallop while setting up the collection’s theme through the voice of a self-proclaimed “old junkie whore” forced to face troubling memories about her role in shaping her long-abandoned son, a cult leader who claimed to be the Messiah and led his mostly white followers to commit mass suicide. The title story, another tour de force, also concerns a single mother, who must decide how far she’ll go to protect her “good kid” after he’s accused of a violent act not unlike one she suffered but keeps secret. Children, in person or memory, haunt these pages, beloved even when sources of grief. For mothers, of course, but in a refreshing turn, Watkins also pays serious attention to the importance of paternal love. After the death of his infant son in “Dog Person,” a father’s problematic attachment to his Great Dane—animals play symbolic roles throughout—obscures the secret betrayals destroying his once-perfect marriage. In “Tipping,” a woman almost overlooks her dead husband’s cheating and lying because he was a loving stepfather. Watkins’ protagonists want to rise above traumatic childhoods but fear, often correctly, that they are failing as parents and spouses. The politics of race are a given in these stories, and equally important are the socioeconomic differences—money, social status, education—that cause divisions difficult to surmount. “Cutting Horse” is an aria about the doomed attempts of a “part gangster, part cowboy” to reinvent himself for his genteel accountant wife. Watkins powerfully depicts unsustainable relationships, but she offers solace in the tough-minded love story “Moving the Animal,” about a woman caring for her husband after his stroke. In the final story, “Time After,” a sister’s search for the brother she rejected out of religious rigidity reveals love’s redemptive possibilities.
Granular yet transcendent storytelling.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780593185940
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tiny Reparations
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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