Gemlike stories from a master of the form.
Deceptively simple stories about older women who meet for lunch.
In her latest collection, Segal, now in her mid-90s, displays a seemingly effortless sense of lightness—even effervescence. These are not stories that strain toward their subjects in agony. They glide with a cleareyed calm and the grace of a writer’s lifelong career to inform them. The book’s first part is made up of a sequence of whisper-thin stories about a group of elderly women who meet every month or so for lunch. It doesn’t feel too presumptuous, going by their conversation and characteristics, to assume these women are loosely based on Segal and her own friends. They chat about topics that are light and topics that are less so. “Our children would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next,” Bessie says in one. In the book’s second part, Segal branches out a bit to revisit some of the material that has appeared in her work previously: fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna as a 10-year-old, for example. Then, too, there are charming and bittersweet stories like the three-page “Divorce,” in which Lilly calls Henry to ask, “ ‘Can you remember exactly why we got divorced?’ ‘You always think things can be explained exactly,’ said Henry. ‘Oh, really!’ she said. ‘Is this one of the things that I “always” think?’ ” It isn’t just that Segal has a fantastic ear for dialogue, a magnificent wit, and an apparently infinite patience for her characters, who can be, as we all can, grumpy, difficult, forgetful, and argumentative. At this point in her career, Segal’s confidence in her own narrative ability is such that she allows her grasp to loosen to glorious effect. These are stories as light as air, as life itself, and yet they go on reverberating afterward.
Gemlike stories from a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781685891015
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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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