An admirable if upsetting account of childhood abuse and resilience.
Simonye dramatizes her grandmother’s harrowing childhood in this debut historical novel.
Columbus, Ohio, 1920: Stella Miller’s mother Clara is prone to unpredictable behavior, on one occasion pulling a pistol on the local druggist when he refuses to offer his products to her “on loan.” Clara abandons the family without explanation when Stella is only 4 years old, though Stella has a faint memory of her mother being forcibly driven off by her father and one of his friends. Stella’s father then sells the family home and moves the children into a dreary boarding house on Southwood Avenue. “The pillars were dirty,” notes Stella. “The house was a dingy gray color with peeling white trim. It looked unwelcoming. When we walked up the steps for the first time, I felt like we were trespassing on someone else’s property.” While their father works, the children are placed in the care of their landlady, Mrs. Spangler, whose cruelty and negligence leads to Stella’s sexual abuse at the hands of the woman’s teenage son. To survive, Stella clings to her siblings—who are sometimes helpful, sometimes not—and tries to grow into a woman more equipped to deal with the world than the tortured Clara was. At its best, the author’s observant prose contains brilliant, psychologically revealing details, as here when Stella’s father stops by to visit them at the boarding house: “I studied his melancholy face while Mrs. Spangler prepared supper. He suddenly looked different to me. He looked smaller. He looked weak for the first time. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed the back of it. He smelled like fresh soap.” The author reveals in the preface that the novel is based on the experiences of her grandmother, and the book sits uncomfortably between biography and fiction, with much of the meandering story related in summary form rather than as dramatized scenes. Simonye includes a section that delves into Clara’s backstory, highlighting some parallels between mother and daughter, but the intense focus on the tragedies in Stella’s life makes for a somewhat grueling reading experience.
An admirable if upsetting account of childhood abuse and resilience.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798990534100
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Snowy Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
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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