A stirring if discursive saga of immigration and racism.
A novel about the ways crime and racism intertwine in the lives of three families.
As Worrell’s novel opens in Northern California, 2022, a racist young woman named Daria Keenan (“web-designer and regional white-pride organizer by day”) and her group of white supremacist friends have targeted Carl Graham, a 68-year-old Black muckraking journalist whose inquiries into the shady D’Bettano corporation have made him the enemy of high-powered white supremacists in California. Daria herself is a fervent disciple of former Trump aide and ex-con Steve Bannon, and her powerful aunt, Jeri-Lee, is even more closely connected with the felon-in-chief’s inner circle. “Jeri-Lee loved having power,” readers are told, “power in material wealth, power in social settings, power in politics, power in controlling the narrative.” Daria and her friends tail Graham, and they no sooner run him off the road than the setting switches to the 1960s Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. Here, readers meet an array of characters, from Det. Dan McBride, who’s investigating Paolo D’Bettano (“Many criminals are noisy about their criminality,” he thinks about the sly D’Bettano. “A rare few are truly genius at being low-profile monsters”) to Mary DeLuca and her best friend Jimmy Fain, whose father, Irish immigrant Jack Fain, is killed by mobsters for advocating against the racism of the time (“Humankind’s alarming sociopathic tendencies across all continents bewildered and disgusted Jack”).
This tremendously ambitious novel seeks to flesh out and dramatize several genealogies of racial animus. Worrell ably meets this goal by amassing a great deal of historical information and filling it with flesh and color. The book’s descriptions of mid-century Brooklyn are as evocative as anything written on the region in decades, and the frequent detours to older history effectively ground the later action and go a long way to making this author the Michener of Canarsie. This all comes with one drawback: The book’s plot lines are difficult to follow, and often disappear for whole chapters at a time since the storyline jumps back six decades to tell the life story of one character’s father, and then jumps back three decades more to tell the whole story of that character’s grandfather. This approach validates the generational arc of the book, but it can make for maddeningly distracting reading. When a character is run off the road, seemingly to his death, readers might not want to wade through 30 chapters, numerous family trees, and multiple waves of immigration to find out what happened to him. Fortunately, the characters are uniformly well drawn, from foundational social justice saints, like poor Jack Fain, to a far more complex figure, like Carl Graham. Readers equipped with lots of curiosity and a good deal of patience will find both amply rewarded in these pages, particularly in the morally devastating concluding sections, when ethical condemnations are handed out: “Too many people straddle the line, unable to keep it real and maintain what can honestly be reasoned to be sensible convictions or principals.”
A stirring if discursive saga of immigration and racism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
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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