Witty, painful, and thoroughly unsettling.
Identity, like reality, is a slippery thing for the women in van den Berg’s latest collection of short stories, all of whom are grasping at a sense of stability that seems forever out of reach.
All 11 stories here are sharp as they are haunting; in this world—maybe like the real one—nothing is exactly what it seems. In “Cult of Mary,” which is as short as it is devastating, a daughter takes her aging mother on a quietly gut-wrenching group tour of Italy. Against the backdrop of an earthquake-ravaged Mexico City, “Karolina” a divorcing art restorer, runs into her brother’s now-destitute ex-wife and is forced to confront truths about her brother she has managed until now to willfully ignore. In “Lizards,” a husband plies his unhappy wife with cans of special sparkling water, off-brand LaCroix but with sedative properties, for when she “simply becomes too much.” And doesn’t she also, in a way, appreciate the dulling of her own mind? “The truth is that she is angriest at her own anger,” van den Berg explains, “which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use.” Other stories have a darkly surreal edge, like sweaty, hyper-realistic nightmares; someone has always disappeared or is in the process of disappearing: A husband vanishes into a tree; a woman is casually kidnapped by her new friend. In the title story, a woman named Margot semiaccidentally begins impersonating her missing sister at an Italian academic conference. They are raw and searching, the women at the centers of these stories. She didn’t want her sister’s life, Margot thinks. “All she wants is to feel like she isn’t being destroyed by the world.” The stories here, vibrating with loss, but wickedly funny, are a distinctly van den Berg–ian hybrid, as biting as they are dreamy.
Witty, painful, and thoroughly unsettling.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-10209-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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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