Two tales of impassioned struggles that are often compelling, despite uneven prose.
A pair of character-driven stories from Leven.
In the first of the book’s two tales, “Mom and Apple Pie,” Laura Halprin is a young girl with family problems. Although she, her parents, and her grandmother live in a seemingly pleasant country setting, their home is beset with domestic turmoil, due mainly to mother Amelia’s alcoholism, which has been a problem for years, and even endangered her husband’s job as a lawyer. After their move to their new house, Amelia seems to get control of her behavior—but after a few months, she’s stumbling home drunk again, and her family is pessimistic about her ever changing her ways. In the second story, “Alliance of Affliction,” a New York City couple forms an odd bond. Lilly Stanton always wanted to be a dancer, and she worked hard toward this goal, training religiously and pushing her body to its limits. Now in her 20s, she finds herself in incessant pain. Along comes a young man named Peter Morgan,who’s also obsessed with physical prowess. He spends hours in the gym, and has pushed his body as far as it can go—and, despite his sculpted appearance, he’s also in agony. He and Lilly meet and discover their shared experience, but will they learn how to yield to their limitations? Both stories tell of people in grim circumstances, but they also offer inklings of hope that, for example, Amelia will kick the booze or Lilly will find a calling outside of dance; this not only keeps readers’ attention, but also allows the narratives to move at a quick pace. Several passages, however, earnestly express sentiments that are obvious from context, such as that Peter “couldn’t accept the fact that his body was deteriorating and rebelling…and at the young age of twenty-nine!” At another point, it’s noted that Amelia “reeked from the smell of booze, smoke, and vomit,” followed by the unnecessary statement that the “stench was horrendous.” Still, the main characters’ situations are engaging enough that readers will want to find out if they can manage to defeat their personal demons.
Two tales of impassioned struggles that are often compelling, despite uneven prose.Pub Date: April 23, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-67-235857-4
Page Count: 107
Publisher: KDP Amazon
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
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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