An inventive, bighearted meditation on growing older.
Anderson tracks the peregrinations of the eponymous piece of furniture in this literary novella.
Chare is a chair—just one of many identical red plastic chairs owned by Indiana University. She has no individuated identity until a February night in 1985, when Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight picks her up and throws her across the court in an act of frustration over a referee’s call. At that moment, Chare goes from being a chair to the chair, “a new piece of Hoosier history,” as one spectator observes from the stands. That spectator is Ron, a divorced dad attending the game with his 12-year-old daughter, Gwen, during the one weekend of the month he gets to spend with her. Ron actually used to work on the custodial staff at the basketball arena, but he was fired a few months earlier for coming to work drunk. Now, sober and determined to rebuild his reputation in Gwen’s eyes, Ron prevents another fan from stealing Chare and ends up taking her home himself. Unfortunately, later that night, the debt-ridden Ron’s truck is repossessed, along with its new cargo. Chare spends 10 years holding up a television in a mechanic’s office—except for the night when she serves as the platform for a long-simmering tryst—until she rides in the back of a truck with a Mustang bound for a movie shoot in Washington, D.C. She’s stolen from the set by a boy looking for a souvenir, and then spends years in the boy’s family’s basement, watching him and his siblings grow up and move away, until finally she’s sold during a family garage sale. Further adventures (as well as long periods of stillness) follow, in which Chare continues to enjoy her front-row seat to the daily miracles and tragedies—weddings, babies, deaths—that mark the lives of human beings. Via this unlikely path, Chare eventually makes her way back to Indiana, where her part in Hoosier history comes full circle.
Anderson tells the story from Chare’s perspective, capturing the more dynamic lives of the human characters from her passive point of view. The most exciting moments occur when she moves to a new location, frequently without any context for what’s happening. “Mom danced Chare all the way up the stairs and outside to the driveway. Chare saw items from the house she hadn’t seen in years. It was quite a reunion. The next day, a woman handed Mom one dollar and carried Chare to the back of her small purple pickup truck.” The author takes the plot in some peculiar directions, including the September 11th terrorist attacks and the use of an anti-Arab slur (Chare punishes the slur-sayer by tipping him over backward). The novella occasionally feels less like a coherent story than an extended creative writing exercise, but the narrative nevertheless captures something of the melancholy that comes with the passage of time—the sort experienced most acutely by the caregivers (and, perhaps, objects) left behind when children grow up and leave home.
An inventive, bighearted meditation on growing older.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798988749325
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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