A detailed tale of the powers of thought, chance, and love.
Debut author Vernieri presents a character-driven Spanish-language novel about an imaginative young woman.
ArgentinianLina Guzmán has always been introverted, but if she finds a quiet space, she can transport herself to Planeta Lina: an imagined fantasy locale that she finds far more interesting than her real life. She also ponders philosophical questions, such as “¿Quién dice qué es lo real y qué no lo es?” (“Who is to say what is real and what is not?”) The problem is that she can’t spend all her time on creative activities, such as writing and drawing. These are nice hobbies, she thinks, but not typically practical; her parents want her to study medicine or architecture. Her life’s winding journey eventually takes her to Europe and Africa. In a parallel storyline, readers meet Cuban-born, Florida-raised Johnny Barkley, who’s giving a speech in New York City. He’s developed a method to fight drug addiction that he discovered during a lucid dream. His technique has had good results, but despite his success, he’s troubled by his lack of a serious romantic relationship. But after he picks up a book in the airport titled El Hèroe, he’s so taken with it that he feels compelled to track down the author; this quest brings him into contact with Lina. Vernieri effectively portrays Lina as always open to new possibilities; even relatively small experiences can have an immense effect on her. A simple kiss prompts her to comment that “mi cuerpo temblaba como una hoja, mi alma vibraba en plenitud” (“my body shook like a leaf, my soul vibrated”). As with Johnny’s story, external events play their role, but it’s internal developments that generate the most intriguing questions. When Johnny has his dream, for instance, it involves taking an imaginary pill; its real-world inspirational effect may strike readers as simultaneously possible and impossible. Some of Johnny’s backstory feels long-winded (as when the reader is informed of his mother’s many struggles escaping Cuba); however, when the novel tackles the odder aspects of the mind, it does so eloquently.
A detailed tale of the powers of thought, chance, and love.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4269-1548-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2022
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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