A bleak, engrossing tale of the seemingly endless damage that brutality causes.
In this debut novella, a group of Americans can’t escape the inevitability of violence.
Gracie is the daughter of a hardened criminal. Her father is a known murderer who always carries a gun and gets drunk every night. Gracie can’t help but witness some of his ferocity, as when a carjacker tries stealing her dad’s beloved car. Elsewhere, young Robbie regularly fishes with his adult friend Paw Paw. The two, as people of color, habitually deal with bigots. But Paw Paw is an “old school” gangster who uses his giant hands to fight to the death. This book contains an assortment of narrators, each with a tie to someone else. There’s a man who retires after winning the lottery. Now he has everything he wants, but when he sets his sights on a young girl, he’s practically welcoming trouble. One boy grows up in a household with devout Christian parents. This entails summers at a camp that teaches outdoor survival. There, he trains with guns and learns combat skills, which he uses during savage confrontations with other “followers.” Gherardi’s brisk but grim story cycles through a plethora of irredeemable characters. The innocent titular youngsters are surrounded by killers, racists, and child abusers. The author deftly shifts among clearly defined characters with discernible narrative voices. Likewise, the nonlinear tale’s varying time periods, though unspecified, are never confusing. For example, some characters note another’s death only for the deceased to narrate a later chapter. In this absorbing story, Gherardi’s relaxed prose reads like people relaying their tales to others. Robbie, describing his mother’s unfortunate state, says: “Mom was on the bad path. No fairy tale ending to her story. Close to the end, I hate to admit. Looking skinnier and weaker every time I saw her. Looked like she was losing hair, too.”
A bleak, engrossing tale of the seemingly endless damage that brutality causes.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-832119-2
Page Count: 138
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 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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