The only bad thing about this book is that you will likely finish it in one sitting.
Just a little comedy about the loss of all worldly possessions, near-deadly assault, brain surgery, and violent revenge.
When we meet Allison Brody, she has just left an abusive movie-producer boyfriend in Los Angeles, driven across the country, and bought a small but sweet foreclosed beach house in North Carolina. Once you get to know the hapless protagonist of Dermansky’s fifth novel, you realize this sequence of decisive actions was a pretty big accomplishment. Allison is plagued by self-doubt (“Maybe leaving had been stupid”), agency is not her strong suit (“Allison was not sure what to do”), and she has no faith to sustain her when, a week and a half later, a storm destroys her new home. (“Such a God, Alison was sure, would have to be a man, and not a particularly nice one.”) Sentences with fewer than 10 words, mostly one-syllable each, are the building blocks of this stripped-down narrative—the tone is so consistent it's a kind of poetry. “Allison was homeless and she was broke. It was wild how fast the tides could turn. Part of her also knew that she was fine.” Unfortunately, Allison is not all that fine, and the cruel winds of destiny that blew her house down are not finished with her yet. Again Dermansky has come up with a seemingly artless but in fact very controlled novel, focusing this time on the many things other people do to our heads without permission (this is a metaphor with legs, you’ll see). Small comic gems sparkle in their deadpan settings on every page. No matter how bad things get, Alison's running joke to herself—she still has her health—never ceases to amuse her, though at a certain point, “she did not think anyone else would think it was funny.” She’s wrong about that.
The only bad thing about this book is that you will likely finish it in one sitting.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32088-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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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