The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.
Timeless spins on classic Greek myths.
These stories generally begin in media res, leaving the reader to puzzle along with the characters over just what's going on. The protagonist is often given no name, and the context and circumstances are unclear—as is the border between the natural and supernatural. Time itself is apparently an illusion, a construct. Can the narrator be trusted? The narrator’s world? Yet through the accretion of detail the story begins to cohere, often in the manner of a fairy tale or parable, offering a moral that is both instructive and unsettling. “He is drifting a long way from the shore on some dark, interior sea,” describes the plight of the protagonist of “The Quiet Limit of the World,” one of the longest and most expansive tales, apparently covering centuries. Its epigraph invokes Tithonus, the human lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Her father (Zeus, presumably) has granted the protagonist immortality, though nobody mentioned eternal youth, so the protagonist is sentenced to wither away without end. "You are going to spend a long time with a very old man. Or you are going to leave him," the father says with a laugh. Many of the stories lack any sort of resolution, making them seem all the more existential. There’s a sense that they exist outside of time, that they have been repeating themselves forever, and will continue to do so, even as the gods of classic myth have given way to science and technology (as in the experimental gene-editing facility of “The Wilderness”). “My Old School” is an outlier here, more a story of contemporary realism than recast myth, yet also offering a moral for its untrustworthy narrator. The author seems to be toying with the essence of storytelling, the way that it has persevered and sustained itself through the ages. “The decades spin past,” he writes. “The blur of dragonfly wings.”
The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550864
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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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