Most compelling when history intersects with the emotions of women figuring out their lives today.
Present and past mirror each other as an aged Russian woman tells her American granddaughter the story of their family’s struggles to survive the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II.
Kiev-born Kuznetsova begins her novel with a knowing nod to Russian literature: a formal character list that pointedly includes pet cats and gives clues to the plot ahead. The opening scene reads like a traditional framing device when Natasha, a Russian born, American-raised actress Skyping with her almost 90-year-old Baba Larissa in Kiev, asks for the full story behind how Larissa’s grandmother Tonya died in WWII. And at first, new mother Natasha’s typical millennial ambivalence toward domesticity seems less important than Larissa's story. In a tough, cynical voice devoid of sentimentality, Larissa describes how, in 1940, after a life of coddled comfort lasting through Communist rule, her suddenly penniless grandmother Tonya moved in with her engineer son, Fyodor, Larissa’s father. Soon Germany’s invasion forced Fyodor and family to evacuate Kiev to Lower Turinsk, accompanied by the Orlovs, a fellow engineer’s family. Tonya favored Larissa’s younger sister, Polya, whom the bookish 13-year-old Larissa considered a frivolous “lobotomized swan.” But family roles began to change as survival required increasingly difficult sacrifices and ethical choices. While Larissa discovered complicated romantic feelings toward the two Orlov brothers, Polya turned inward and Tonya grew pathetically demented. Meanwhile, the original framing device begins to dissolve as the secrets Larissa reveals (or keeps hidden) about herself and Tonya parallel the crises Natasha faces—loving her (unbelievably understanding) husband and infant daughter while becoming dangerously attracted to her husband’s friend Stas, who represents the free-spirited independence she craves. In shifting first-person narratives in which they analyze each other with assumptions that may or may not be accurate, Natasha and Larissa build a portrait of family love in all its variations.
Most compelling when history intersects with the emotions of women figuring out their lives today.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-51190-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
