While this is not a terribly ambitious novel, it is brilliant at what it does achieve: a sociological and very funny...
This fine, if slight, first novel is set in New Orleans, "a fateful green garden," with streets named Indulgence and Religion and Desire, where the narrator's lover, Claude Collier, the wastrel son of a brilliant lawyer, goes to night court and the drunk tank in a district called Araby.
The narrator, Louise Brown, has just returned from college in Boston, and goes to a wedding where "Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued." In party scenes worthy of Evelyn Waugh, we observe young upper-class debauchees reluctant to let go of childhood, their "dry" parents, and an aged lady who talks of nothing but clothes and hats: "But her frivolity was heroic. She did it on purpose." And we learn that the best lovemaking happens in the bamboo grove. We go to the races with Claude and Louise, and to the funeral of his baby brother, Saint. The loss unhinges Claude's father, and Claude himself, who goes north; Louise, distracted, goes to Carnival and loses her job; Claude comes home, only to get into a racetrack betting scandal, and the wedding party is reunited, four years later, at the wild birthday party of the bride. The book's themes are love and loss, particularly (though the time is 1980) the defeat of the South, which has made Claude and his father what some would call weak, others gentle. "Among the Yankees I have known, I only met one who had the grace to apologize to me about the War," says Louise. Yet her voice is comic in its deadpan urgency, delivered in short, terse sentences that now and then break open in a lyric mode.
While this is not a terribly ambitious novel, it is brilliant at what it does achieve: a sociological and very funny portrait of a people and place that haven't changed, much, since the Civil War. Throughout the book black and white societies pass close to one another, but never join.Pub Date: June 10, 1985
ISBN: 9780394544458
Page Count: 143
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2026
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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