A contemplative but ultimately underwhelming tale.
In Taylor-Garcia’s literary retooling of the biblical story of Job, a school administrator is beset by professional and familial tragedy that challenges his faith.
Principal Malik Rosario has been so successful at rehabilitating a failing school in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood that he’s earned the nickname “The Quiet Lion.” However, a catastrophe transforms his life: A local, poorly constructed bridge collapses, claiming the lives of many people, including two of his three sons. The official story is that the disaster was just an isolated incident, instead of yet another tragic event in this neglected community’s history—a false narrative that Malik is prepared to challenge. However, in anticipation of this response, the school authorities relieve him of his duties on the pretense that they suspect him of financial improprieties. In Taylor-Garcia’s “modern reimagining of the Book of Job,” an enigmatic figure known as “The Watcher” stands in for Satan; he coordinates the assault on Malik’s reputation, using “mass surveillance, media warfare, and political erasure.” Malik demands to confer with God about his troubles—not to hurl accusations, but rather to petition for understanding. As a whole, the story reads less like a novel than it does a didactic parable or lengthy sermon. Whatever one thinks of the author’s revision of the biblical story—a reinterpretation so stark that it bears little theological resemblance to the original—it lacks the fundamental features of a well-constructed novel: a skillfully developed plot, fully realized characters, and believable dialogue. The story’s denouement is triumphantly pious, and Malik delivers plenty of defiant oratory. However, the prose style more often feels distractingly ponderous: “He felt the weight of solitude, but more than that he felt the weight of the world’s betrayal, of God’s betrayal, of grief so dense that it held the air and the light hostage. The weight of a bridge.” The story’s thoughtful focus on technologically driven character assassination is engaging. However, it’s not enough to counter the novel’s other flaws.
A contemplative but ultimately underwhelming tale.Pub Date: April 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798892950183
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Bamboo Village Books
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2025
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
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