Magical events illuminate the all-too-real problems of Hawaiian women in an impressive story collection.
In Hawai‘i, girls and women fight to find their identities amid conflicting cultures in stories touched with magical realism.
The female protagonists of these stories range in age from preteen to 70, and all are of Hawaiian or mixed heritage. They struggle with gender issues and motherhood, with food and body image, and they find it difficult to bridge the demands of multiple cultures, to reconcile the traditions of Hawai‘i with the chaos of modern America. Often, traditional legends of ancestral warriors and mythical creatures spring to life amid the everyday. In the title story, 12-year-old Sadie is grappling with the onset of her first period and her family’s insistence that she learn about precolonial Hawai‘i: “She learns too much about her culture, things she wishes to unknow.” Is the ban on carrying pork with you (even leftovers in Tupperware) as you travel a certain road just a superstition or a real curse, one that manifests years later in a nightmarish pregnancy? In “Story of Men,” the frazzled mother of six kids buys a used clothes dryer and finds inside it a Menehune, a magical being that might be something like a cuddly elf or might be a primeval avenger. Whatever it is, this one takes over the household, with surprising results. In “Temporary Dwellers,” a teen narrates a story that takes place in a world where the island of Kaua‘i is being bombed for military training. A refugee from the bombings, an angry girl about her age, moves in with the narrator and her mother on another island. Both the newcomer and the situation in Kaua‘i are wreathed in mystery, and the narrator becomes obsessed. “Ms. Amelia’s Salon for Women in Charge” is a surreal take on cultural notions of female beauty in which a Hawaiian woman with a blond haole boyfriend visits a place where having her pubic hair waxed is paid for with an ominous “trait exchange.” In “Aiko, the Writer,” the title character, whose manuscript for a book about the legendary Night Marchers is doing things manuscripts don’t usually do, is advised by her dead grandmother, in the form of a gecko: “There are ways to tell Hawaiian stories and ways to make Hawaiian stories vulnerable to the white hand. You’ll need to be extremely careful with your choices.” Those choices animate these absorbing stories.
Magical events illuminate the all-too-real problems of Hawaiian women in an impressive story collection.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781639731169
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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