A compassionate, nonjudgmental look at the difficult decisions that pregnant women face every day.
Rasmussen’s novel follows the courses of two pregnancies, each marked by trepidation, heartbreak, acceptance, and joy.
For Rachel, a 30-year-old kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles, a baby can’t come fast enough. She and her husband, Brett, have been trying for years, but when Rachel finally finds herself pregnant, the news ushers in a host of concerns: When to tell her parents? How to decorate the nursery? And the worst question a pregnant woman can ask herself: What if something is wrong with the baby? With compassion and warmth, the author sheds light on the physical and emotional roller coaster a pregnant woman experiences and the ways in which a pregnancy—whether it’s planned or not—upends one’s life. Alternating chapters tell the story of Katie, a 32-year-old single woman who becomes pregnant after a chance encounter with a former classmate. Raised in a dysfunctional household, Katie has serious concerns about raising a child alone, especially after she learns that her baby has a 1 in 3 chance of being born with Down syndrome. A devout Catholic, Katie seeks support from her church even as her circumstances force her to consider an abortion. After Rachel also learns of a threat to her fetus’s health, the two women meet in a support group and form a deep bond. The novel suffers from a few strained plot turns, such as Katie’s belated attempt to uncover her ancestral history, but its true heart is the friendship between Rachel and Katie, a connection that affirms the importance of chosen family. The author endows her characters with an endless capacity for light banter. In a novel that concerns miscarriages, abortions, fetuses with life-threatening conditions, and families cracking under pressure, this buoyant sense of humor sometimes feels jarring, but it does brighten up the mood, as in a tender scene between Rachel and Brett: “I think you should leave me and find someone who can give you a baby. What about Martha from the dry cleaner?” Brett responds, “You will never get rid of me; I love you too much….Besides, if things didn’t work out with Martha, I’d have to find another dry cleaner.”
A compassionate, nonjudgmental look at the difficult decisions that pregnant women face every day.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781956851601
Page Count: 324
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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