A meaningful modern tale of becoming, belonging, and the ties that bind.
This Mansfield Park retelling follows the trials and tribulations of two cousins—one Nigerian, one English—from 1978 to 1992.
Ten-year-old Oluwafunke Oyenuga enjoys a happy life in Lagos with her Nigerian father, Babatunde; her English mother, Lizzie; and her little brother, Femi. Though Funke loves hearing stories about Lizzie’s youth in Somerset and the “magical palace” called The Ring where her mother was raised, Funke has never met her family there. Lizzie’s parents disapproved of her marriage to Babatunde, and her sister, Margot, spurned Lizzie after her fiance jilted her due to the scandal. But when a car crash claims Lizzie and Femi’s lives, Funke is sent to England, where she quickly discovers that her mother’s idyllic tales don’t live up to the reality. Her grandparents are distant, her aunt Margot is often outright hateful, and The Ring is cold, gray, and dilapidated. The only bright spot in Funke’s new life is her cousin, Liv. Free-spirited and good-natured, Liv seems to be as different from the rest of the Stone family as Funke is. The two girls become fast friends and remain true allies throughout their teen years, during which Liv gives Funke a new Anglo name, Kate. But when their grown-up ambitions—Kate plans to attend university in Bristol; Liv is hoping to be “discovered” in London—set their lives on different courses and tragedy finds the family once more, the cousins are torn apart. Can they right generational wrongs, or will the specter of loss continue to haunt them? Frequent time jumps sometimes make it difficult to fully connect with the characters, but the author is gifted at bringing her settings to vibrant life. The heat and humidity of crowded Lagos sizzles off the page, while the gray clouds and isolation of Somerset perfectly mirror the suffocating expectations of legacy, culture, and identity that Kate and Liv face.
A meaningful modern tale of becoming, belonging, and the ties that bind.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9780063084292
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
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