A very fine novel about a mother’s love and a son’s survival.
A woman and her son live with bad judgment, bad company, and bad breaks in Triant’s latest novel.
Fay is a water tank escape artist with a sketchy touring show called “Amazing Humans.” She and her teenage son, Dickie, aka Pete Smith, and her loser boyfriend, Johnson, are scraping by in Key West. A letter from her friend Ginny says that the Amazing Humans act has a gig at a rehab place in Vietnam, where there is big money to be made. Off Fay goes, and of course there is no big money to be made, and Vietnam is a dangerous hellhole. She is desperate to get back home, where she has left her son in the dubious care of Johnson. Chuck, her obsessive lover and the owner of Amazing Humans, will not let her break her yearlong contract. But break it she does when a white phosphorous, or “Willie Pete,” device explodes and she winds up back in the States, alive but hideously disfigured and desperate to find Dickie. Meanwhile Dickie flees Key West, winds up in New York City, and eventually makes a sort-of life for himself in Provincetown on Cape Cod with his friend Spin, who has AIDS. Having known only trailers in his youth, Dickie longs for a home that’s not on wheels. Fay, in her transactional world, always comes out on the short end of transactions. In this novel from the author of The Treehouse(2018), the symbolism comes through loud and clear: Fay is an escape artist who can’t escape her circumstances, and Dickie was left with a disability from early polio after his mother rejected the vaccine. Those who expect a feel-good novel to come from all this will be disappointed. But they will be captured by very good writing and wonderful portraits of Fay and Dickie, who eventually achieves one of his dreams—and who, in the last line of the book, reveals something that suggests that he may finally be escaping from his mother’s water tank.
A very fine novel about a mother’s love and a son’s survival.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-405-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
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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