A strong debut that uses gauzy impression to explore the harsh realities of post-communist Eastern Europe.
Abandoned as a child, Leah navigates a world of invisible outcasts.
Leah was born during the difficult post-communist transition period in Bulgaria. Her parents are unknown, and her earliest memories of the care home in which she is raised are of neglect, abuse, and her persistent desire to become invisible and thus escape the chaos of her surroundings. Repeatedly passed over for adoption, Leah eventually ages out of the system. She and Naya, her friend and lover, are turned out of the orphanage at 18 with no support system and few prospects other than homelessness or prostitution. Leah and Naya stick together and are able to afford a shared room where they become a family for each other in spite of the shared trauma of their past and the persecution they face as a same-sex couple. One day, however, Naya leaves without explanation and Leah is abandoned once again. She responds to this persistent feeling of invisibility—which reoccurs throughout the novel as both a symbol of protection and as the curse of a callous system all too ready to overlook what it does not want to see—by volunteering and then working with special needs children. In the course of this work she meets Dara, a child who has survived tremendous trauma, and finds in the girl a way to “patch up her childhood,” if only the authorities can see past their prejudice and declare her a mother. Leah’s story is told in episodic snatches of thought and memory which are interrupted by nine stand-alone stories of marginalized people—Salim, the Roma boy maimed by his mother to make him a better thief; Suki, a runaway from a coastal Bulgarian city trafficked into sex work in Amsterdam; Aksinia Levina, a former ballerina aging alone as the neighborhood cat lady, and more. While these interspersed narratives sometimes veer into the territory of trope, the novel as a whole succeeds in making visible both the dignity and the intimate familiarity of lives lived on the fringes of a society that would much rather pretend they do not exist.
A strong debut that uses gauzy impression to explore the harsh realities of post-communist Eastern Europe.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948830-37-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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