An expansive, moving tale that illuminates the dangers of gentrification and the complexities of the human experience.
Howard’s debut novel, based on true events, reveals memorable characters and pressing social issues in a small town.
Morley, California, is a town of “convenience stores, payday loan outfits, discount houses, and dialysis clinics,” but it’s about to get a radical makeover. In a bid to attract investors, real estate broker Monica Sampson-Smith urges her ally and sometime lover Mayor Rusty Purnell to move ahead with redevelopment. The first victim of advancing gentrification is Morley Plaza, a drab strip mall past its prime but home to quirky, lovable characters that make up an offbeat community. The novel’s short chapters follow the plaza’s inhabitants: tough but altruistic Dr. Sunita Reddy; film buff Jeremy Kelner, who’s trying to keep a video rental store afloat; Donna Hart, the owner of bookstore Pickwick’s Paperback Shack, which carries everything from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) to vintage pornography, and her self-appointed sidekick, Geoff Saboteau, a dog day care clerk whose disturbing hatred of local transients consumes him. As Howard details his cast of characters with patience, sincerity, and precision, he reveals tender moments of human connection. The novel’s most moving plotline revolves around recent ex-convict Nic Troxell, who finds himself in a co-dependent, abusive relationship with a man he met through a prison pen pal program. Nic’s attempts to escape lead him to uncover crucial information that could save Morley Plaza, but there are many gray areas in this book; Nic’s feelings, for example, remain complicated—always precariously balanced between self-preservation, explosive anger, and compassion. Whether dealing with large social issues or innermost truths, Howard keeps the various players questioning their allegiances—to lovers, friends, and politicians—and struggling to make the right choices.
An expansive, moving tale that illuminates the dangers of gentrification and the complexities of the human experience.Pub Date: July 28, 2022
ISBN: 9798986218113
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Green Mill Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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