This resonant tale about a poetry lover features a unique voice and a hopeful ending.
A Black teenager rises above tragedy in this coming-of-age novel.
It’s 1995, and life isn’t easy for 14-year-old Leonard Gerard Robinson Jr., known to everyone as Junior. Sports aren’t his thing, which makes it tough to fit in at his school and in his North Philadelphia neighborhood. Junior prefers reading books and writing poetry in his beloved journals, much to the delight of his mother, Sandy, and the chagrin of his father, known as Senior. But Junior finds much-needed solace in words—others’ and his own—especially after a stray bullet ended his younger brother Lawrence’s life the year before. Still mired in grief, Junior’s parents deal with a marriage that’s on the rocks (they were planning to file for divorce on the day Lawrence was shot), and Senior tends to take his anger out on his son. The family moves to a new neighborhood in South Philly for a fresh start, but when Junior is expelled from his high school for standing up to a bully, home life becomes even tenser. Neither of Junior’s parents finished high school, so his graduation is their shared dream. When Junior enters Medgar Evers Secondary, an empathetic school secretary named Casey and a driven teacher called Brother Gay see potential in the angry but intelligent teen and push him to find a life outside of his neighborhood. Jarelle’s novel pulses with vibrant descriptions and a love for hip-hop stars like Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony. Junior’s original poetry begins every chapter, deftly setting the scene for the stories to come, and all the poems are available as a collection at the end of the book. Though at times the prose gets repetitive—Junior’s home haircut and secondhand clothes are mentioned multiple times when once would have sufficed—the protagonist’s journey is compelling and addictively readable, the characters rich and nuanced, and the setting nostalgic for those who remember and illuminating for those who don’t.
This resonant tale about a poetry lover features a unique voice and a hopeful ending.Pub Date: June 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-622481-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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