It’s rich territory, if not entirely mined.
Tensions grow between the co-founders of a hot, womencentric startup in this hyper-timely—and unexpectedly heartfelt—satire of #girlboss culture and the wellness industrial complex.
Maren and Devin are the co-founders of Richual, a social network for women. In addition to tracking your self-care habits—minutes meditated, REM sleep slept, water consumed—it was, Maren explains, the “digital sanctuary where you went to unload your pain,” mostly in the form of yoga selfies. In the unofficial org chart of Richual, it is Maren’s job to be competent and Devin’s job to be rich, charismatic, and thin. "More than work wives," Maren muses, "Devin and I were sisters." And the company is a perfect mashup of their comparative ideologies, Maren’s commitment to global social justice paired with Devin’s passion for self-care. But as the company comes under a series of extremely 2020 stresses—the novel opens with a PR disaster brought on by one of Maren’s ill-conceived tweets and culminates in a distinctly #MeToo–era crisis—their visions of what a feminist company can and should be become increasingly incompatible. Richual is a stand-in for any number of real women-led companies that sell female empowerment as an affordable luxury, and Stein sets up both the dream and the failings of this breed of corporate feminism with admirable nuance. But the book is smarter than its characters, who are exactly who you expect them to be, right down to the details meant to complicate them. This hardly takes away from the fun of the novel, which is compulsively readable, occasionally brilliant (a Vogue slideshow about their office is titled “Workplace as Vulva—And Why Not?”), and studded with genuine insight into the relationship between modern wellness and dormant rage. But the book—which leans heavily on references in lieu of precise observations—is ultimately too broad to have much bite.
It’s rich territory, if not entirely mined.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313519-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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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