Nashville and Wall Street provide an authentic setting for smart characters, tight prose and just the right amount of detail.
In Burger’s novel, the successful daughter of a country-music legend returns to her Tennessee home and realizes she has more in common with her dysfunctional family than she thought.
Haley Emerson moved to New York to distance herself from her hard-living Nashville roots and to prove there was more in her blood than bourbon and guitar licks. It worked—until she went home for Christmas to find her estranged father back in the picture and her diverse siblings and hard-as-stone Southern “Momma” struggling with the implications. The initial result is the expected one: Haley, the Wall Street wunderkind, deals with stressors just as her father would, and it isn’t long before her job and drinking become part of the problem. While the themes lean toward the typical (big city vs. country, money vs. morality), the author’s tight, smart prose allows them to bloom with a depth and wit lacking in many similar setups. Yet, as a former TV writer, Burger occasionally falls into the traps of screenwriting. Her visual narration, though not utilitarian by any means, has a tendency to jump quickly between scenes. That said, the subplots to which it jumps—those involving siblings and friends—remain compelling enough to complement Haley’s personal struggles, revelations and revolutions. What ultimately drives the narrative’s success is the author’s patience and attention to detail. Burger, who has experience both in finance and country music, builds believable backdrops of New York’s financial district and Nashville’s Music Row. So, like a good country song, it’s not the dysfunction, abuse, alcohol, adultery or faith-issues that sell the Emerson’s struggles, but rather the three-dimensional world into which Burger inserts them.
Nashville and Wall Street provide an authentic setting for smart characters, tight prose and just the right amount of detail.Pub Date: March 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1462074631
Page Count: 292
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2012
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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