An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic.
A stifled Japanese American writer, separated from her family during the pandemic, finds unexpected intimacy with an arborist.
When an unnamed middle-aged writer and professor learns her mother has been diagnosed with dementia, she returns to her Northern California childhood home, leaving her two daughters and husband behind in Hong Kong. This decision coincides with the onset of the pandemic—referred to coyly as “the sickness”—and suddenly what was supposed to be a short stay has no end in sight. Having placed her mother in a care facility, the narrator splits her time between teaching an online college course on Japanese aesthetics; video calling her husband, who is preoccupied by work; and tending to her mother’s expansive but struggling garden. A local nursery recommends she consult with a man known as the Tree Doctor, whose body immediately enthralls her: His eyes “suggested to her something molten whirling around at his core”; his “hands were like the branches of an oak.” What follows is a raw, passionate affair spent between the garden and the bedroom, where the Tree Doctor uncovers a desire the writer is unaccustomed to, and where she pushes herself toward the overlap of pleasure and pain. Isolated from society, she rediscovers herself in her body, invigorated by the idea that she is at her core a piece of nature. “Can you wake up a body the way you can wake up a tree?” she asks, and indeed that seems to be the case. Through a yearning first-person narration, the protagonist’s trials evoke difficult but vital questions about survival and endurance: When does a person admit that a loved one’s declining health can’t be reversed? When does a society concede the fact that “there would never again be a ‘normal’” and learn to adapt? These interrogations are threaded seamlessly into the narrator’s pursuit of her own power, a pursuit that reveals just how liberating the decision to dismantle and reassemble one’s self can be.
An affecting story of personal transformation, as broody as it is erotic.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781644452776
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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