A novel of skillfully wrought interiors that struggles to find its vanishing point.
Episodic glimpses of a woman’s life in a time of personal trauma.
The speaker of this elliptical novel-in-fragments is a young woman adrift in Buenos Aires at the tail-end of her 20s who has agreed to cat-sit for her ex while he’s in the hospital. The ex is a formative first love, and the malady that prompted his hospitalization appears to have been psychological, violent, and at least partially aimed at his most recent ex-girlfriend, Violeta, whom his mother refers to as “contained.” As the speaker cares for the volatile cats and their new litter of kittens, she also cleans the apartment she once shared, confronted by lingering traces of violence: “a hank of hair as if pulled out by force, long hair,” “blood in crevices between the floor-tiles.” Meanwhile, the narrator’s own life is stalled by trauma. Her troubled mother has recently died; she herself has suffered the miscarriage of a pregnancy she had only begun to suspect; her graduation date is indefinitely delayed by a “backlog of final exams [she’ll] never be able to pass.” Bolstered by a “modest” inheritance from her mother’s estate, the narrator casts about for an experience, an activity, a love, the clarity of a philosophical truth that will deliver her life back into her control with the same kind of “static and well-lit order” that she seeks to return to her ex-lover’s apartment in the wake of chaos. Articulate and piercing at the sentence level, the books suffers somewhat from the same kind of drifting apathy that afflicts its main character. Though it grapples with larger themes—the economic “apocalypse” of life under Argentina’s austerity-driven government, mental health, wealth inequality, and the commodification of youth—the narrator’s own gaze remains fixed firmly inward on a landscape which, for better or worse, resists the “luminous” clarity of early morning light, when “objects have clear boundaries” and “everything is perfectly defined against its background,” and more often slides into shadow, where “objects [get] in the way of other objects, and everything ends up conveying the sense of an irrecoverable loss.”
A novel of skillfully wrought interiors that struggles to find its vanishing point.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780811239059
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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