Ranges from the excellent to the meh to the miserable. No one said you have to read them all.
A dozen stories of the absurdities and challenges of life.
Holdstock, a British-born Canadian author known primarily for historical fiction, here turns her attention to contemporary characters. The stories in the current collection vary greatly both in tone and appeal. Several comic and sometimes surreal pieces, mostly with female protagonists, almost seem as if they’d been written by a different author than those with darker and grittier themes. Both the strongest story in the collection and one of the least palatable center a dog. The opener, “Perfect Obedience,” is a gem. As it begins, Vita decides to adopt a dog, despite the fact that her boyfriend is obsessively concerned with the neatness and cleanliness of his house. Though the people from whom she adopts it seem a little too happy to see it go, “It wasn’t a bad dog. You could, in fact, say it was good. The way Vita saw it, there were no grounds, none at all, to give a person pause, so to speak—unless you counted certain aspects of its behaviour.” Actually, this dog, Abigail, is a holy terror. But with recourse to philosophers including C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, and Leibniz, Vita makes the case that “just because we don’t like the outcome of its actions doesn’t mean it’s bad.” Funny events ensue as she and Abigail burn through various housing situations and relationships. But later in the collection, “Spot” is an extremely unpleasant account of two old drunks, brothers named Bri and Merv, who torture and plan to murder a stray pup they take in once it gets ill and incontinent—in the woods with a nail gun. Good God. Animals also face grisly deaths in “Danny, Is That You?,” a depressing story about a woman with a deeply depressed teenage son. “Perfect Beauty” is one of a handful that incorporate surreal elements as a woman’s compulsive antiaging rituals kick in with a vengeance. Reminiscent of some of the intriguing speculative stories in Rachel Khong’s recent collection, My Dear You, it ends up closer to Abigail than Spot on the Applause Meter.
Ranges from the excellent to the meh to the miserable. No one said you have to read them all.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9781771967174
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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