A redemptive and briskly plot-driven family story.
Shared cultural and familial trauma—and lousy men—loom large in this wry mother-daughter novel by Rosenberg.
San Franciscan Leyla Rothstein and her mother, Aurora Feldenburg, couldn’t be less alike. Leyla has a seemingly insatiable desire for efficiency, order, and perfection in her appearance, her family, and her marriage, and her perpetually cash-strapped mother is content to live amid the clutter of the past, gliding through the world clad in rhinestone-adorned velour sweatsuits and sparkly sneakers. Their interactions are often strained, as they often involve money—namely, the funds that Leyla sends her mom every month to bolster her meager Social Security checks. Leyla’s conversations with her mother are frequently laced with proverbs in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of the family’s Rhodian roots. Two things bring the semi-estranged mother and daughter to Los Angeles: Leyla’s suspicions that her husband is cheating on her during a cannabis industry conference (his alleged mistress owns a company that makes THC-infused toothpaste for dogs), and Aurora’s desire to see if her late father’s recently deceased wife put her in her will. Predictably, the weekend dredges up long-suppressed family issues. Rosenberg’s novel has an effortless, dry sense of humor and quippy tone that lend themselves well to its chaotic storylines; along the way, it offers thoughtful details about Rhodian culture, language, and mysticism. The characters, as outlandish as they are, feel believably real, from their speech patterns to their idiosyncratic habits; Aurora, for example, delights in the “burnt smell of the English muffin in her old GE toaster oven,” while Leyla privately frets over which waste bin she should use to dispose of a biodegradable wine glass. Such detail extends beyond the interior lives of the characters, making for a breezy, funny, and propulsive read.
A redemptive and briskly plot-driven family story.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781960573674
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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