An affecting novel about the duality of hope and despair.
The intersecting lives of six people living in Jerusalem and in need of organ transplants are chronicled in Wolf’s emotionally charged novel.
Twenty-one-year-old Leah Weiss is one of eight siblings, all of whom grow up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. She suffers from chronic kidney disease and as a result regularly undergoes dialysis, exhausted and demoralized by her rapidly worsening condition. Her former fiance, Moshe, leaves her to wed Leah’s best friend Bassie. Leah’s mother Hindy obsessively tries to find her a husband, even hiding the fact that she’s “damaged goods” to increase her prospects. Another character, Yael Glassman, suffers from chronic lung disease—as a single mom, she frets anxiously about the future of her young daughter, Tikva. Here, she reflects melancholically on the profound allure of leading a normal life: “How lucky she was to have gotten a double lung transplant nine years ago, and to have lived for a few years magically believing she would always be a healthy person. To have traveled, fallen in love, had a baby. And yet…how cruel it was, to tease her with those years.” Now, she needs yet another transplant, a predicament shared by five other characters whose lives become entangled in various ways despite their diverse backgrounds (some are Jewish, some Muslim, and one, Father Severin McConnell, is a Catholic priest). Israel is a uniquely difficult country in which to obtain a new organ, given the prohibitively strict religious rules against the desecration of the body; these restrictions affect all of the protagonists. In the background of the medical drama is the eruption of extraordinary political violence, which serves to terrify some characters and send others into despair—but it also furnishes a measure of redemptive hope, since the death of some could mean the survival of others waiting for organs. Here and there, Wolf comes perilously close to a lachrymose sentimentality but never fully commits that literary sin, always maintaining an impressive authorial restraint. The result is a deeply poignant narrative.
An affecting novel about the duality of hope and despair.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781958762134
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Arbitrary Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2025
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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