Sublimely complex characters drive this story that promotes empathy for all earthly creatures.
A college student’s mysterious origins may have ties to her dreams of talking animals in Walters’ novel.
Frances “Frankie” Connor’s professor challenges her on the first day of her neuroscience doctoral program: He vehemently disagrees when she claims one particular lab rat is, quite simply, ticklish. Frankie is convinced that animals understand humans beyond reading their tone of voice or body language. It’s a theory she’d like to prove, especially now that she’s dreaming of forest creatures, like a gray wolf and a squirrel, who regularly converse with her. These interactions feel real—one animal recites a poem Frankie has never heard before. They also apparently know, but won’t say, where she’s from; Frankie, who was adopted, knows only nominal details about her birth parents. So, in between lab experiments on animals’ communication with humans, Frankie delves into her murky past with a bit of help from both a fellow student and the professor’s research assistant. With any luck, she’ll uncover enough to remember who she really is. Walters’ mesmerizing, multilayered protagonist truly elevates this tale. She’s not without flaws, including bouts of selfishness, and her relationships are thorny, particularly with her adoptive parents and younger brother. Frankie also suffers from depression, the chief reason she’s interested in the field of neuroscience (“I realized I could use neuroscience to do some good. You know, study the brain to find out how to help other people not go through what I did”). The main mystery is inside her head—readers only know what Frankie knows, and it’s unclear whether or not she’s genuinely speaking with the animals. Her hazy genesis further complicates the plot. Welcome lighthearted touches include such lovable animal characters as Shelly, a turtle who’s always seemingly out of breath. While the message of extending kindness toward all nonhuman animals is somewhat heavy-handed, the novel’s multi-dimensional, multi-species cast gives it much-needed impact.
Sublimely complex characters drive this story that promotes empathy for all earthly creatures.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781684632428
Page Count: 256
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2023
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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