A solemn, sometimes-sketchy family excavation.
Why did Laura Smith’s mother, Viola Umberto Wilkins, vanish from her 12-year-old daughter’s life? Thirty years later, in search of an explanation, Laura begins to uncover Viola’s complicated, tragic past.
It’s more about the journey than the arrival in Morris’ latest, a somber account of three generations of women, with a focus on abandonment. Laura has spent decades wondering about various explanations for her mother’s disappearance and dealing with the associated pain of unknowing. Now, at 42—the same age Viola was when she left—and for vague reasons, she sets about tracing her mother’s history, traveling to Brindisi, Italy, where the family lived till Laura was 6, when they moved to New Jersey. The Italian Viola had met Laura’s father, a U.S. serviceman, near Naples during World War II, and Laura believed that was where Viola’s roots were. But in Italy, she is able to locate a building called the Red House, the repeated subject of Viola’s paintings, and this discovery, plus conversations with an old man, Tommaso Bassano, reveal startling facts. Viola was Jewish—not Catholic, as Laura thought—and she, her parents, and brother Rudy were displaced from Turin and imprisoned with other Jews at the Red House in 1942, swept up in the violent antisemitic segregation of the era. Now the narrative switches—sometimes confusingly—between Viola’s and Laura’s perspectives. Viola catches the eye of young Italian soldier Tommaso, who loves her and tries to help the starving Jews. As the novel’s historical dimension intensifies, embracing Viola’s parents’ stories, too, its mood darkens and it becomes an ever-harsher consideration of survival. Laura’s pilgrimage to Italy helps her heal and understand her mother better, but other facets of the story remain unresolved. It’s a melancholy spiral of a narrative, at times slack and repetitive and with loose ends, but the unusual historical aspect lends gravitas.
A solemn, sometimes-sketchy family excavation.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780385544986
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
