A delightfully meta novel about a woman writing her way out of calamity.
A would-be biographer pursues two potential paydays in Upton’s comic novel.
Tabitha Acrete is 50, divorced, and in need of some cash. She’s a biographer by trade, and though her last effort—Annie: Her Life Story, about her deceased dog—was a flop, she has two prospective subjects whom she hopes will rejuvenate her career. One is Brent Vintner, an actor “so good looking they should bottle that man and spray him on belligerent people as a form of crowd control.” The other is Piper Fields, a renowned children’s book author whose career has taken a hit since the discovery that she writes erotic novels on the side. Both Brent and Piper happen to be in Tabitha’s hometown of Midlothian for the next several months, which should give Tabitha plenty of time to pry into the recesses of their private lives. The only problem is that Tabitha’s past celebrity profiles were so poorly received that she’s basically blacklisted—a fact that she misrepresents to her publisher. As Tabitha attempts, with mixed results, to worm her way into the lives of Brent and Piper, she also grapples with the legacy of her deceased ex-husband’s ashes, the colorful patrons of her nephew Leon’s bar (called The End of the World), an unwanted intern, and the fact that she might not be a very good biographer at all. Upton’s prose is razor-sharp—as filtered through the unpredictable and slightly delusional perspective of Tabitha, it takes on a magical, frenetic quality. Here, Tabitha tries to justify why a biographer isn’t really a writer: “As a biographer I’m ferreting out truth, outlining a life until the contours are visible. It never feels like writing to me. I’m not inventing anything. I’m releasing a life, clarifying a life. I’m more like a painter or a photographer than a writer. I hardly even work in—in—words.” Though many madcap events occur, it’s Tabitha’s humorous and hypnotic voice that propels the story.
A delightfully meta novel about a woman writing her way out of calamity.Pub Date: May 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781952386893
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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