A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.
A chronically ill theater professor upends her life when she stages Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
After a freak accident, Miranda Fitch—who was a dazzling, up-and-coming stage actress—loses her acting career, her marriage, and her formerly pain-free life. Working at a university’s “once flourishing, now decrepit Theater Studies program,” Miranda is spiraling out of control. Her days pass in a flurry of pills, doctor appointments, and dissociative conversations; she struggles to manage her chronic pain and to make others believe the extent of her suffering: “On vague fire in various places, all over, all over. Burning too with humiliation and rage.” Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided. During a particularly tumultuous appointment with one of her doctors, Miranda says she knows what he thinks of her: “One of those patients. One of those sad cartoon brains who wants to live under a smudgy sky of her own making.” For the student production, Miranda wants to stage the “problem play” that took everything from her: Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. But her students—her lively, limber, and treacherous students—want to put on Macbeth, and it looks like they will get their way until Miranda meets three strange men in a bar. In exchange for “a good show,” the men offer her what she’s always wanted: no more pain. Once Miranda realizes how to transpose her pain to others, her luck begins to change—or does it? As her physical aching dissipates, almost everything else in her life becomes more vibrant. However, when no longer tethered to her pain, Miranda becomes unmoored from reality in increasingly dangerous and deranged ways. Imbued with magic and Shakespearean themes, the novel swings wildly between tragedy and comedy and reality and unreality. Although the novel sometimes struggles under the weight of its own surreality, Awad artfully and acutely explores suffering, artistry, and the limitations of empathy.
A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982169-66-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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