A searing but sensitive look at recovery from irreversible harm.
In Van Hecke’s debut novel, a mother and daughter’s relationship is affected by repressed trauma and subsequent guilt.
The storyalternates between the lives of Colleen,a happily married mother of two, and Rachel, Colleen’s eldest daughter in her first year at Lakeview College.As the novel opens, Colleen; her husband, Derek; and their youngest daughter, Izzy, are driving to Rachel’s cello concert. They seem like a family with typical woes: Derek travels often for work, and his business requires the family to move from Chicago to Arizona and back again within a year—much to Colleen’s chagrin. In college, Rachel tries to gain some independence from her parents by getting an apartment with her best friend, Mandy; she also takes a class on the intersection of gender and violence. As she writes a research paper on the sexual abuse of children, she begins to uncover buried memories of her own sexual abuse by her father. After Rachel tells Colleen what happened to her, many years ago, they’re forced to contend with the damage that Derek has caused. Van Hecke’s novel walks a delicate line, initially depicting Derek as a sympathetic character before candidly exploring the results of his horrific behavior. For much of the novel, Colleen actually attempts to salvage her relationship with Derek and to get Rachel to do the same; however, the memories of her father’s abuse affect all aspects of Rachel’s life, including a burgeoning romantic relationship with a boy in her class. Van Hecke’s prose is most powerful when it describes Rachel’s emotional and physical trauma, and it deftly captures the dissociation that comes with post-traumatic stress disorder; for example, when the young woman’s memories surface, Van Hecke writes, “It was more like her fingers themselves remembered…raking across that couch arm.” During a particularly emotionally fraught confrontation between Colleen and Rachel, Rachel slams a door that’s said to be “like an open, screaming mouth.” In sentences such as these, the ramifications of Derek’s abuse strongly reverberate.
A searing but sensitive look at recovery from irreversible harm.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2020
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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