A richly textured saga of a gay everyman moving from self-doubt to pride.
A gay man searches for love in post-Stonewall New Orleans in Lee’s brooding romance.
In 1946, Leo Marble, still ensconced in his mother Louisa’s womb, mystically imbibes a gay sensibility straight from a performance of the Broadway musical Carousel. Growing up in Beau Pre, Mississippi, Leo develops a fine singing voice just in time to star in a high school production of Carousel, which makes the girls swoon over him; he dutifully goes steady with one as “camouflage” while secretly pining for a football player. College brings Leo’s first requited—but chaste—relationship with a man. After graduating, Leo moves to New Orleans to write for the Times-Picayune and dives into the city’s thriving gay bar and disco scene. He also joins the New Orleans Gay Resources Coalition, where he mans the volunteer help line and organizes a march to protest the anti-gay rights campaign of entertainer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant. Heading into the 1980s, lonely Leo hunkers down as the AIDS epidemic rages but finally finds love with handsome TV weatherman Jay Wilkinson. Lee’s portrait of Leo’s life is subdued but well observed (the author adds a touch of magical realism) as the narrative traces the gay community’s modern success story. Apart from one incident in which he is tackled by a heckler at a demonstration, Leo personally faces little overt homophobia and seems to easily surmount the crumbling barriers to inclusion. (A series of coming-out scenes with family and co-workers all go well; even elderly Granny Marble gushes with acceptance.) The novel’s drama comes mainly from Leo’s anxieties over a future that seems uncertain and loveless, which Lee depicts in plangent, evocative prose (“He could turn on the gas from one of the burners, lie down and just go to sleep. He hadn’t figured out what would happen after that”). He’s not all that majestic, but readers will root for Leo as he struggles to shake off his isolation and embrace life.
A richly textured saga of a gay everyman moving from self-doubt to pride.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781956440935
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Madville Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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