An engaging narrator draws the reader through this compelling story of love, betrayal, and identity.
A young girl’s coming-of-age in a small Southern town takes unusual twists in this historical novel.
After young Memory Feather’s father runs off with a “French hussy” and leaves her and her mother, Virginia, nearly destitute in New Mexico, they reluctantly move to Virginia’s hometown of Belle Cote, Mississippi. Virginia detests the town’s bigotry and insular attitudes, and she dreads being dependent on her loving but judgmental parents, but it’s 1953 and single mothers have few good options. Memory, who narrates the novel retrospectively, was born with a withered hand with only three fingers, and she fears being shunned for it. But Belle Cote has one big attraction: Virginia’s lifelong best friend, Mac. Today, Memory tells us, “we would simply call Mac McFadden gay, one of the countless gay men who flourish in small southern communities.” In 1953, Mac is tolerated—as long as he doesn’t go too far. His boundless charm and the popular art and antique shop he runs help offset the clucks over the raucous parties he hosts in his big, lovely house. Virginia and Memory happily move in with him and, for a while, things are good. Memory is taken by a portrait in Mac’s house, a painting of an arrestingly handsome man he calls his “beautiful dreamer.” Then the man seems to step out of the frame and show up at the front door. Attacks on gay people as well as violence against civil rights activists haunt the story, but the biggest threat to the trio of Memory, Virginia, and Mac is the beautiful Tony Amato. Mac is thrilled by his return. Memory knows Mac has what the town derisively calls “house boys,” but she is fuzzy on what that means. She’s even more puzzled when her mother and Tony begin to flirt. Memory tells us she’s always had the ability to understand the speech of animals, and Mac’s huge black cat, Minerva, keeps telling her, “Things are going to get much worse.” Minerva is right. Belle Cote and its Gulf of Mexico locale are richly evoked, as is New Orleans, and the author handles suspense deftly. Memory’s witty voice moves convincingly between a child’s innocence and a teenager’s dawning awareness—sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying—of adulthood.
An engaging narrator draws the reader through this compelling story of love, betrayal, and identity.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798885740364
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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