A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life.
Consumed by the minutiae of caring for a family, a Tokyo housewife ekes out a perfectly ordinary but profoundly unfulfilling existence.
Newly translated by Barton, this brief but piercing stream-of-consciousness novel manages to feel topical more than 25 years after it was published in Japan in 1997. Its eight chapters and 190-odd pages are linked not so much by plot as by tone and theme. Thirty-something wife and mother Natsumi spends her days doing chores, running errands, gossiping with neighbors, and tending to her husband and their two young sons, all the while fighting a vague, nagging sense of ennui. Natsumi resigned from her "easy-but-tedious job" after she’d had her first child and has not worked outside the home since. Her inner monologue, a vivid mishmash of memories and observations, mingles with the events of the book to provide a window into her perspective. While Natsumi acknowledges that her life is not bad per se, she is nevertheless frustrated by its monotony and mundanity. She has visited the nearby supermarket so many times that she has the layout of the store memorized. When she finds an old shopping list in a jacket pocket one day, she's “utterly sickened” to discover that it's nearly identical to the one she wrote on a memo pad moments before. “There was,” she thinks at one point, “something Sisyphean in the nature of the roster of simple domestic tasks that she had to get through day in day out, a sense that however much she did there was never any end in sight.” Laden with descriptions of objects and locations, Kanai’s detail-rich sentences offer a specificity of time and place that make the story feel grounded in reality. In portraying Natsumi’s conflicted relationship to her roles as wife, mother, and housekeeper, Kanai considers the potentially reductive effects of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity on personal identity.
A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780811232289
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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