An earnest attempt to plumb the depths of Jewish ancestral memory.
A contemporary Jewish philosopher grapples with the meaning of the Holocaust in modern life.
Following a complaint from a troubled student, Jacob, a young philosophy professor, loses his job teaching a course on Jewish theology after the Holocaust and shortly thereafter learns that his wife has been having an affair. With his life in shambles, a chance encounter on the streets of New York City with Baer, a Holocaust survivor, leads him to Baer’s niece Rachel, a frustrated art historian and widow of an ultra-Orthodox Jew who died by suicide after she led him to follow his sister out of that community. The pair embark on a trip to an isolated estate on an island off the coast of Maine owned by Alex Baruch, a disgraced scholar who’s attempting to entice Jacob into supporting his Manhattan Kabbalah Center. They’re there ostensibly to attend an auction of a sketch illustrating a scene from the biblical story of Job that Baer claims was given to him by its creator and later stolen. At Baruch’s sanitarium they’re joined by a handful of others with personal or familial connections to the Holocaust, mirroring Jacob’s own link through his father, the child of survivors, born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and unable to shed his inherited trauma. Several times during the course of their stay, Jacob and some of the guests visit the titular tavern, a ramshackle establishment where wooden angels spring to life to deliver bad Borscht Belt standup comedy. Despite its sincerity and frequently evocative prose, the novel founders on an opaque narrative that forsakes chronology or any other intelligible structure and shifts abruptly between the perspectives of Jacob and Rachel, as it attempts to illuminate both the ordeal of Holocaust survivors and the struggles of the generations that followed them, all while exploring its main characters’ emotional turmoil. Inside this psychologically complex and seductive stew of provocative ideas is a profound story, but it can’t escape the oppressive weight of Collins’ high-concept approach to telling it.
An earnest attempt to plumb the depths of Jewish ancestral memory.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781938603525
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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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