An entertaining novel that nicely captures the hopes and dreams of four young professionals in New York City.
Four New Yorkers in their 20s build relationships and careers in Cullen’s novel.
In 2004, Jessica returns home to find her boyfriend in a compromising position with another woman. She laments the relationship, especially since the two were planning to move in together. Rent is sky-high on the Upper West Side, but Jessica gets a tip about a two-bedroom unit, with the roommate’s share at $1200 per month. The leaseholder is Robin, an assistant brand manager for Victoria’s Secret skincare. She invites Jessica to look at the place, but another person beats her to the punch: Tory, a trust fund baby who still lives at home with her warring parents. They have altered the trust to give her less money, so she needs the relatively affordable rent, as her publishing assistant job pays next to nothing. Jessica, learning that she won’t get the apartment, bursts into tears and meets Zach, who lives down the hall. He is riding high with his job at Expedia, but he invites her to be his roommate. She moves in, and it’s not long before he makes a move romantically and she considers moving back to her native Sonoma for good. The author gives equal time to her four protagonists, and fills each of their stories with enough complexity to make their busy lives enjoyable to read about (Jessica on her graphic design job: “some power-hungry Harvard MBA comes in at the last minute, tweaks one of the charts, and takes credit for ninety pages of my work. Then I come back the next day and do it all over again”). The narrative is laser-focused and the writing self-assured, with the interconnected stories making room for a few gratifying surprises. With four revolving narrators, distinctions between them are key, and the voice of Robin could have been made less generic. Yet Cullen has a terrific ability to evoke the milieu and write about that age when everyone is so busy and everything feels so pivotal.
An entertaining novel that nicely captures the hopes and dreams of four young professionals in New York City.Pub Date: July 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798986383033
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Lime Street Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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