This debut collection brilliantly and hopefully contests the finality of any story.
Ten stories set mostly in contemporary Hawaii feature troubled family relationships and the hope of repair.
Rigg’s debut begins in “Target Island” with the detonation in 1948 of a 2,000-pound bomb on Kaho‘olawe. The shock hits a family living across the channel in Maui: a mother thrown against a stove, a father knocked unconscious, and a baby, Harrison, somehow escaping injury from the shattered glass in his crib. For Harrison, the aftershock becomes his life’s work as he strives to reclaim and clear Kaho‘olawe of bombs, ultimately for his granddaughter, whom he hopes “will bring her own children to this place, will point at the bomb-free earth and say, ‘Your great-grandpa did this.’” Throughout the collection, this hopefulness runs alongside the characters’ sorrow over estranged or failed relationships and the despoiled ecosystems of Hawaii. Characters recur, sometimes as the parent or child of another character, sometimes peripherally, and often unnamed, and the resolution of one story turns out to be provisional in light of events in another. The turbulent mother-and-daughter relationship portrayed in “(Partheno)genesis,” for example, is surprising given the father’s perspective in an earlier tale, and the breakup that devastates a main character of the title story is triggered by the offstage reunion of two characters who had been separated at the conclusion of another story. Among the standouts are the last two entries. In “Poachers,” a young woman worries about an unexpected pregnancy given that her own mother’s love is “a feeling so fragile that she sometimes, in its absence, wondered if it existed”; while helping her boyfriend’s mother poach flowers for sale, she finds another source of love for herself and the child she may have. In the title story, this child, now grown, and her father attempt to reconcile from a falling out with the help of unnamed spirits. These spirits proclaim that stories do not end, an insight that this collection, refracted through different perspectives over many generations, skillfully illuminates.
This debut collection brilliantly and hopefully contests the finality of any story.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9780063419971
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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