Lee’s self-aware, relentlessly honest narrator feels absolutely real, and her story cuts deep.
A long-simmering tragedy unfolds in the Kim family of California, from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
The title of Lee’s heartrending debut novel employs a Korean word that isn’t defined in the text. Most sources describe “han” as a collective feeling of sorrow, resentment, regret, and internalized anger stemming from the historical experience of suffering; the story of the Kims expresses this complex emotion in a number of ways. The novel opens in December 2001, when Jane Kim’s mother shows up unexpectedly at her apartment in San Francisco, announcing she’s planning to move into town from Jane’s childhood home in Napa. Jane is not happy to see her, explaining, “Our relationship had soured to the point where I’d become almost mute around her, a habit formed out of instinct and anger.” The elder Kims, who have recently split up after decades of incompatibility, arrived along with the wave of Koreans who came to the U.S. after the Immigration Act of 1965 removed restrictions on Asian arrivals; those optimistic times are now far in the past. Jane is in her last semester of law school, but plans to leave the state and apply for the bar somewhere else, seemingly to escape her parents. Later chapters revisit the childhood Jane shared with her brother, Kevin, both having had notable junior tennis careers, and track the unfolding of a serious crime Kevin committed in 2002, when he was a San Jose cop. Lee captures the culture of the Korean diaspora both with small details—a jar of kimchi buried in the yard for more than 10 years, dug up only when the house is sold—and with broader brush strokes. “We have a sense of loyalty, of obligation, as if we came into the world with it programmed in our DNA,” Jane observes. “Responsibility reaches beyond the filial, beyond members of our own families, encompassing an entire network of people with whom we share shame and grief and pride and a way of seeing something funny in the bleakest situations.” But it is at that last point that the author parts ways with the community. Lee’s refusal to find comedy in the Kims’ personalities and predicament is rare, and extremely effective.
Lee’s self-aware, relentlessly honest narrator feels absolutely real, and her story cuts deep.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9781643757254
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
