A quiet domestic novel that soars.
Three siblings bring their families together to celebrate the first Christmas after their mother’s death.
When Helen, their strong, opinionated, bighearted mother, dies suddenly, siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin and their spouses are left unmoored by her absence. Gathering at Henry and Alice’s home in upstate New York, the family hopes to keep Helen’s traditions alive while navigating holiday stress, interpersonal drama, and the unsettled nature of their inheritance: their childhood home in Florida. The house, however, is not the only tension within the group. Henry, an artist, spends long days constructing a flock of clay birds and fretting over climate change, while Alice, a social worker, ruminates on their childless life after years of fertility treatments. Struggling with their differing opinions about ambition and parenting, Martin and Tess live in New York City with their two kids. Kate and Josh, who have found themselves on the wrong end of bad financial investments, hope to move into Helen’s house with their three children. Despite being set over just three days, Strong's book manages to distill the essences of not only the characters, but of their decades of shared history and the complicated, complex relationships among them. Above all else, the family loved Helen, and in the wake of her death, they must navigate the new dynamic and learn how to love one another again. Across town, Quinn and her daughter, Madeleine—Alice's clients—are relearning how to be a family, too, after Quinn temporarily lost custody of the girl. When Madeleine goes missing, the siblings spring into action to find her—and, in the process, begin to gain perspective about their own lives and relationships. With deft, discerning prose, Strong writes beautifully about mothers and the struggles, fears, and joys of motherhood. At one point, Kate confesses the depth of her grief to Tess: “But she’s the only person in the world who ever saw me the way she saw me, who loved me like that, who remembered me as all the things I’d ever been and also thought of me as all the things she still thought I might become.” As the novel comes to a close, Strong offers moments of connection among the family members that feel genuine and earned.
A quiet domestic novel that soars.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-313514-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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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