A sophisticated and discerning family portrait.
An affluent Brooklyn family navigates family drama, career trouble, and long-kept secrets in Karpa’s novel.
Roger White is a film professor at New York University, but his first and only screenwriting success is far behind him. He’s going through the motions at work and longs for a good idea to revive the creative side of his career. His second wife, Casey, was raised in rural Missouri and is now comfortably set up in their Brooklyn home, due to the generosity of Roger’s mother Sherbeam, a celebrated Manhattan artist whose star is beginning to fade. Their kids, Demmy and Abby, attend an exclusive school, but Casey has some insecurities about the fact that she doesn’t live in Park Slope like “all the other mothers” who “walked (or hired someone to walk) their progeny to school.” She’s driving a Porsche, but her own Spanish translation service is foundering; she’s also still haunted by the loss of her first husband and daughter, who tragically drowned in the Mississippi. Meanwhile, Demmy is busy with applications to Ivy League schools while still trying to reject her own privilege, and the egotistical Sherbeam is planning a celebratory retrospective of her work in Barcelona. Egos collide and tensions flare, though, when Sherbeam’s new paintings are revealed, and Casey makes a discovery that will send the entire family into uncharted terrain. Karpa’s fictional White family seems at first glance to live and thrive in an increasingly frivolous locale. Several stand to inherit large sums, and trust funds and luxury cars are the norm. However, the complex novel takes off in several unexpected directions, diving into Casey’s Southern roots and Sherbeam’s emotionally abusive behavior. As a result, the narrative becomes absorbing, and it’s well-informed about contemporary fads and mores while staying expertly focused on the characters’ hopes and losses. Overall, it’s a deeply satisfying story that’s written with intelligence and wit, and—like the on-the-go White family—never stays in one place too long.
A sophisticated and discerning family portrait.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9781736244456
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Mumblers Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
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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