An imperfect but often arresting fiction collection.
A volume of literary novellas and short stories ponders death and God.
Heaven isn’t far away in this collection—but its proximity isn’t necessarily a good thing. The house of the title novella is home to the Rosenweigs, Polish Jews fresh from Hitler’s Europe, who seek to build a new life for themselves in upstate New York. The novella takes its name from the adjacent seven-story ramp used by workers at the local General Electric plant. The family’s youngest daughter, Davora, wants nothing more than to break out of the rigid future prescribed for her by her parents—even as strange religious visions cause her to question her sanity. A second novella, A Factotum in the Land of Palms, follows a former Florida real estate agent with loose morals who loses his job when his employer is investigated for human trafficking. The ex-agent moves to California looking to start over. There, he is thrown for a loop by the many disparate characters and philosophical traditions he encounters in and around Los Angeles. The accompanying short stories deal with aging and loss: A man in his 70s contemplating his life and legacy sees a phantom coffin on his lawn; a husband, whose health-nut wife just left him, stages a condiment-heavy feast for one. Morganstern’s prose is sharp and surprising. He’s able to capture his characters’ humanity with a few revealing descriptions, as here in A Factotum in the Land of Palms: “I stared at him, the guy I knew in college. The angle man as he was known because he was the self-proclaimed master at zeroing in on what benefited himself the most at any given moment. At least he did when he wasn’t drunk and hurling partially digested pizza and beer on the monuments in the quad.” The novellas have impressively expansive worlds, but both drag a bit, especially in comparison to the three short stories. Even so, the pieces are in conversation with one another, and the book works as a thoughtful, evolving meditation on grief and acceptance.
An imperfect but often arresting fiction collection.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73374-647-2
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Recital Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
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