Timely and at times wrenching stories about contemporary Zambian women fighting to establish their identities.
A debut collection about women living in Zambia and abroad.
Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Kalimamukwento’s stirring stories explore the lives of women weighing their debts to tradition and family against their desire to break free and express their true selves. In “Azubah,” Funso has to return home to Zambia to care for the mother who never seemed to love her. The past still has a grip on her, even though she believes she has bought her freedom by moving to America and remitting her “Black Tax” with every paycheck to ensure her mother is cared for. In “Inswa,” the young female narrator discovers her sexuality with her best friend, another girl, and would rather endure her mother’s abuse than give up the pleasure she’s found. Kalimamukwento has an eye for the poetic possibility of the natural world. After her first kiss, the narrator says her “stomach exploded into an army of golden flying termites, spilling out of their underground castles after a December storm,” and her ears “filled with bees fighting to escape.” In “Mastitis,” another standout, the narrator loses her mother the same day she gives birth to a daughter, though her mother reappears—an apparition—with sage advice and common sense when the narrator needs her most. This collection covers a lot of ground—from the price of privileging English over one’s native language to the dehumanizing U.S. immigration system, from the AIDS epidemic in Zambia to illegal adoption rings. These are complicated and important issues, but at times it feels like Kalimamukwento is cataloging all the social ills that Zambian women face and the steep cost of global imperialism rather than slowing down and deepening our understanding of the particular women and girls who are emmeshed in these heartbreaking circumstances.
Timely and at times wrenching stories about contemporary Zambian women fighting to establish their identities.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780822948360
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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