This novella’s translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait.
From one winter to the next, a year elapses in the life of a little Austrian girl living on her grandparents’ farm in this novella first published in 1951.
Marili is in her 5th year. Imaginative and with outsize emotions, she’s learning to understand the world around her. She knows her hardworking grandfather, who tells her stories and allows her to help with apple cider-making. She knows the hardworking farmhand, who dotes on her. She knows her beloved grandmother and is just starting to comprehend the reasons behind the old woman’s melancholy—namely, the loss of her children, several of whom died during the war. Included among these deaths is Marili’s mother, Lisl; Marili sometimes makes newspaper dolls to represent her lost family and relegates them to the attic of her little log dollhouse, where she imagines her grandmother happy again because her dead children are once again within reach. The little girl prays at night: “‘Dear God,’ she thought, ‘let no one be sad and take the regret away, definitely do that, please.’” Haushofer’s novella is effortlessly poignant in this way throughout. As the year goes by, Marili experiences the quotidian—the return of her favorite flowers in spring—and the existential, as when she contemplates who Jesus was or when she attacks a bigger boy in town who threatens to drown his own kittens. The reader’s empathy for Marili is almost painful, as she experiences things like bad dreams or seeing a mouse dead in a trap. The book’s charge comes not from plot, but from the emotional tension of finding Marili on the brink of understanding the adult world’s woes and, especially, the mortality that lurks around every corner. Haushofer’s prose is like clear lake water: clean, crisp, seemingly simple yet with surprising depths.
This novella’s translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780811239981
Page Count: 80
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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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