Readers will enjoy this tense, atmospheric family drama.
In Peck’s coming-of-age novel set in 1956, a New Jersey girl struggles with family relationships while on vacation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Every year, Weston and Lydia Grainger take their two daughters, Lily and Dodie, to Cape Cod for a long vacation from a blistering New Jersey summer. Weston, a mild-mannered graduate student, is the opposite of his wife, Lydia, who was born the only child to a wealthy, well-established New England family that valued tradition and etiquette over family ties. This long history of excessive concern about propriety and appearances has turned Lydia into a humorless and often insensitive mother. In contrast, Weston is bright, engaged, and eager to pass on his scholarly enthusiasm to his daughters. Weston’s efforts are successful with Dodie, who’s studious and high-achieving but proud and somewhat cold like her mother. Lily, the story’s 11-year-old narrator, shares her father’s rambunctious spirit but her musical talents likely come from her mother, a born pianist. Readers first encounter the Graingers as they make their regular summer trip, but there’s one noted difference: Despite their modest means, they’re building a house across the lake from Weston’s overbearing brother George’s sprawling home. George is intent on discrediting and lording his privilege over his brother, and on embarrassing his meek wife, Fanny. The couple’s children, Nicole and Digory, each take turns bullying their cousins, with Lily getting the brunt of the abuse. This sometimes folksy, other times stressful coming-of-age story shows how personalities can clash within a family. Peck creates a lively, compelling narrative by deftly choosing to track the story’s progress as one would track an impending storm. As the summer wears on, so does a sense of impending doom surrounding Hurricane Carolyn, which provides nature’s response to the growing tension between and among the various family members, bringing the story to a fever pitch in the last few chapters: “Everyone hoped the storm would miss the Cape and blow itself out to sea. But just when we began to think we could relax, Carolyn veered.”
Readers will enjoy this tense, atmospheric family drama.Pub Date: May 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798986567686
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Sea Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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