A daring book whose innovations are balanced by the sad familiarity of its pain.
An ordinary day in an ordinary life rendered thought by thought.
The unnamed narrator of this debut novel is an Everywoman: She wakes up a little hungover; she hurries to be on time for a soul-crushing job; she scrolls through her Twitter feed with compulsive frequency; she loves but does not quite trust her boyfriend; she has recently been raped. At first the reality of this unsettlingly commonplace assault is cloaked in our narrator’s more long-standing anxieties, which take the form of intrusive thoughts literally intruding on the page from the right-hand margin. As a way of representing the cacophony of the character’s perceptions, British author Watson has created an unusual layout for her words, using not only the traditional left-hand justification but also right-hand justification and centered text as well as lots of negative space, different font sizes, and other typographical pyrotechnics. The physical form of the narrative reproduces the experience of the woman's scattered thoughts, sensory responses, invasive memories, fears, hopes, untrammeled bodily uprisings, text messages, and internet browsing history, which overlap, interrupt each other, merge, and battle in the saturated “now” of the book’s overwhelming immediacy. The result is an unusual reading experience which relates both the mundane (every drip of the narrator's morning shower, every step of her commute) and the revelatory (“When I write a diary…it was always there—the other—the performance of writing! I write thinking someone is looking in, translate my thoughts into something a little prettier, more heightened than my actual head…as if the diary isn’t even for me”). As the day wears on in a series of tea breaks and bathroom trips, the narrator’s efforts to mitigate the damage of her assault, her deep desire to return to a sense of normalcy, and her struggle to tell her boyfriend what it is that happened to her underscore the outrages of the everyday—a dissonant now that cannot be silenced or slowed.
A daring book whose innovations are balanced by the sad familiarity of its pain.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54576-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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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