A vivid, moving collection that explores the unrecoverable past.
A collection of short stories and a novella examine the trials of rural life in a fictional Pennsylvania town.
Snodgrass’ assemblage of fiction, which includes more than three dozen short stories, is set in and around Furnass, Pennsylvania, an old mill town straining under the pressure of modern capitalism and its relentless spread. The prolific construction of McMansions is like a death toll for the area’s vanishing farms, which seem terminally incapable of keeping pace with the times. One of the abiding themes is the disappearance not only of farms, but also legacies—fathers lament the unwillingness of their sons to take over lands they can no longer maintain. For example, in the collection’s novella, The Hill Wife, Noah, an octogenarian farmer, struggles to make ends meet. He wonders if his son, William, a successful real estate agent, pines for his father’s death so he can sell the land. The author presents a typically sensitive and nuanced portrayal of Noah’s tug of war between pride in his son’s accomplishments and resentment at his cold profiteering. In “The Easy Part,” a farmer named Clay is pressured to sell his property, but he clings to the land that has been in his family for eight generations. The short tales are typically very brief, some only a page or two, giving them an impressionistic character, quick snapshots of lives suggestive of backstories never fully revealed. A black-and-white photograph by the author accompanies each tale, highlighting the fiction’s ambient forlornness—a sad nostalgia for a culture that is disappearing not slowly but assuredly.
Snodgrass is at his best establishing an atmosphere of quiet desperation—many of his protagonists, like Clay, know that they can’t win but cling nevertheless to their rapidly displaced ways of life and the inheritances from their ancestors. This stubborn refusal to go quietly can take the form of a defiant, if feckless, pride or materialize as shame. In “An Annunciation,” BJ walks into a clinic in her “brown plaid Walmart five-dollar special jacket” only to be confronted by better-heeled patients. She worries that she’s quickly pegged as “white trash.” The author also unflinchingly tackles the suddenness and inevitability of death and the “endless guilts” of infidelity. Snodgrass artfully contrives an entire literary cosmos, a fossilizing fictional world that faces extinction. But that thick air of lament can be oppressively lugubrious—this is a leaden universe without wit or levity, and the ponderousness can be suffocating. Some of the stories seem to be straining to impart a lesson or function like a moral parable, resulting in a tincture of didacticism. In these tales, treacly sentimentality rears its head. In “Be Still My Heart,” Mary Beth is forced to witness the death of her loved ones repeatedly, a curse of longevity. Her sorrow, though, comes across as canned: “ ‘I had desires too,’ she said out loud, shouted down the hallway. ‘I wanted things too. I’m more than just another fancy plate hanging on the wall. More than just a figurine on a shelf. More than something to put in a stack with all the other stuff you’ve used up but keep around just so nobody else can have it.’ ” Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful compilation, poetically meticulous and often touching.
A vivid, moving collection that explores the unrecoverable past.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-99-977005-4
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
