A sports yarn overburdened with history.
A ping-pong champion is honored while her granddaughter struggles in Lucas and Landsberg’s novel.
Miriam Stahl is about to be inducted into the Table Tennis Hall of Fame, but she’s anxious about some of the media attention she’s getting. Her troubled teenage granddaughter, Jenny, seems to harbor some anger toward the older woman; the crux of Jenny’s issue is that when she became captain of her school’s Ping-Pong team, she was relentlessly bullied, and now she hates everything to do with the sport. Jenny refuses to attend Miriam’s induction ceremony, and her mother, Ronnie, is at her wits’ end. Miriam and her sister, Hildi, head to Toronto for a ping-pong summit. Then readers get a flashback to the 1950s that details some of the ways in which ping-pong was used for politics and diplomacy. Miriam and Hildi become champions in the U.S. around the same time—there’s some anxiety about that, because Miriam and Hildi are Jewish (“They’re Jews and the government is scared of the optics”). The Stahl sisters deal with various forms of antisemitism on their rise to the top. The narrative hops around between communist China under Mao, Nixon’s diplomatic missions to China, the success of the sisters in the 1960s and ’70s, and the present day, as Jenny’s family pressures her to attend her grandmother’s ceremony. There are the roots of a good sports story here, in which the sisters triumph over the dominant Chinese ping-pong players to become champions, but it’s bogged down by background information. (The fictionalized portrayal of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong exploiting the sport for his own ends interrupts the flow of the present-day story.) The authors seem to want to provide a history of ping-pong, but there’s only so much room in this brief novel, and, as a result, the story of Jenny and Miriam almost feels ancillary—none of the characters seem fully fleshed out. There’s some effective dialogue and some engaging ideas here, but the story doesn’t completely come together.
A sports yarn overburdened with history.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781964700021
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Historium Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2025
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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