A quiet but captivating collection of stories with an affecting view of the commonplace.
White’s short stories observe everyday people at turning points in their lives.
The pieces that make up this collection provide revealing looks into the lives of their characters and quickly establish a sense of immediacy. In the title story, a high-powered architect fails to recognize signs in his own home indicating his relationship is failing (“She had ways of hiding things she didn’t want him to know about”). In “Cadmium,” a young man attending his mother’s second wedding learns to recognize her as a person separate from his relationship to her, and they begin to mend the damage she did to their relationship when he came out. In “Smoke,” a woman reckons with the remnants of her abusive marriage as her life literally burns around her. In the closing story, “What You Know,” an aspiring writer can’t seem to write his way past his parents’ tragic deaths. While the narratives in the stories are disparate, the overall theme of growth amid turmoil unites the collection. The writing is compelling and personal, quickly drawing readers into each entry with robust, fully fleshed-out characters. Although intriguing, “The Love of Your Life Show,” which follows a woman on a dating game show, feels out of sync with the other stories—the slightly off-kilter, alternate-reality feeling of this story doesn’t mesh with the quotidian yet profound nature of the rest of the collection. Most of the stories are well-paced, although “Par Avion,” in which an older woman takes off for Greece without telling her children, could have imparted the same message more succinctly. The stories flow neatly into each other, with the intimate atmosphere providing an underlying commonality to the otherwise unconnected characters. Similarly, each narrative builds to a crossroads—some dramatic and some much more muted—and provides an effective hook to grab the reader’s attention.
A quiet but captivating collection of stories with an affecting view of the commonplace.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798992040579
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Type Eighteen Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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