If only these characters could decide whether “to be or not to be,” but that’s a different tragedy.
A novel about a Memphis theater company envelops onstage classical tragedy within offstage domestic farce.
Like a playbill, the novel opens with a “Cast of Characters,” beginning with “The Three Main Characters” and followed by “And the People Around Them.” The three principals are Thaddeus Deerforth, general manager of the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis; Malcolm Ruark, a recently disgraced local TV news anchor–turned-thespian; and Claudette Bradley, one of the company’s principal actors. Each of them has a troubled marriage—two recently ended, and one looks increasingly shaky. Further complicating their stories, as they prepare for their newly renovated theater's grand relaunch with King Lear, are issues of alcoholism and substance abuse, aged parents with dementia, sexual impulses they find difficult to understand and control. The people around them number a few dozen, and it’s tough to keep them straight even with the cast list, but they include a couple of aging lechers—a visiting director from academe and a lead actor known from a Netflix series—who bring plenty of their own issues and have trouble adjusting to Memphis culture, and a pair of billionaire donors, the “Cosmetics Tycoons,” who are funding this attempt to put Memphis on the map of world-class theater cities. What could go wrong? The romantic entanglements, past and present, can be impossible to predict and tough to keep straight, while the dramatic production itself must please the billionaires, impress the city, and manage to keep people who can’t stand each other working together. Outwardly, some of the plot verges on slapstick, but inwardly, there is quiet desperation. “He began wanting a fight,” Bausch writes of one character at a pivotal juncture. “Something to bring it all to a head, some sort of catharsis. But he wouldn’t act on it.” So the reader also waits for some catharsis, or something to happen, to move this plot and these characters forward.
If only these characters could decide whether “to be or not to be,” but that’s a different tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780451494849
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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