An absorbing and vividly rendered journey through a lifetime.
In Summers’ novel, an elderly woman looks back on the moments—good and bad—that have made up her long life.
Nobody pays any mind to people like Birdie. Brought up on the Bible in the small town of Ophelia, Indiana, she reflects on her near-century of life and the “forever days” when she was truly happy, before various reckonings came. She recalls her childhood as the youngest of five children; her marriage to her husband, Slick; her days overhearing secrets as an operator in her town’s telephone office; and her time spent watching her favorite niece, Jenny, grow up. Birdie describes her world in visceral detail, moving between accounts of her youth as a white girl in a place where lynchings of Black residents were commonplace and her final, dying days. Summers’ novel works to unpack her memories and the layers of denial she’s constructed around them. Birdie creates a version of reality for herself in which she’s privy to every secret, but when her own truths become too uncomfortable, she backs away with the declaration, “I don’t want to know so much.” She denies that her husband is gay, and she denies that he is dying. She denies, for as long as she can, the harm that was done to her when she was a child. Only after she passes on these truths to her niece is she ready to say goodbye to the world.
Bird motifs run rampant throughout Summers’ novel. Birdie declares that she can talk to them, and she uses them as a way to process her world; the feelings she avoids come into stark relief in such lines as “the birds were never right during the second war. You can’t have an entire world trying to kill each other and not expect the birds to feel it.” This element returns in the novel’s final pages, in which Birdie accepts her end with an image of birds that “have been flying into windows here all day.” Birdie and Slick’s marriage was considered “mixed” because one was Baptist and the other Catholic, and Summers effectively ties ideas about religion, like so much else in the book, to grief. Birdie lost her own father very young, and as her husband lies dying in the hospital, she refuses to recite Catholic rites, for fear of hastening his demise. Looking back on her niece’s childhood, she realizes that she “started to mourn little Jenny as though she had died,” even though all she did was grow up. Overall, Birdie is shown to be a complex and imperfect narrator: At one moment, her memory is so strong she can “smell the grass in it”; at another, she reflects that it’s “funny what you don’t remember.” For every moment of fond nostalgia, there’s another that rejects the past, and for each instance of keen insight, there’s one that forces readers to question their sympathy. The result is a gradual immersion into the thoughts and memories that make up a full life.
An absorbing and vividly rendered journey through a lifetime.Pub Date: April 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798992615111
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Contenti Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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