Mundane events acquire a magical quality in these engaging tales.
Rietz’s short stories aim to capture the full scope of American life in the years since World War II.
In the opening story, “Christmas Holiday, 1945,” a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany’s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn’t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who’s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In “The Visit,” a man named Rob struggles with feelings of guilt and loss as he travels from Detroit, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina, in the wake of his mother’s death. In “Marooned in Marrakesh,” a married couple visiting their son, Mike, who’s joined the Peace Corps, find themselves stranded in Morocco on September 11, 2001. “Recluse” follows Vincent Jackson, a disabled Vietnam veteran who attends a music festival. A performer is murdered onstage, and Jackson—who was also onstage at the time—is wrongly suspected of murder. A married couple in “Maggie” must put down a beloved pet, and in “Hurricane Helene,” residents of Asheville, North Carolina, try to recover after much of the town, including the famous River Arts District, is destroyed in a flood; “Hitchhiking to Hingning” recalls the story of Edith that was begun in the first vignette. These deeply engrossing, slice-of-life episodes have the air of a folk song, in which characters are quickly introduced (often in medias res) and presented with low-stakes problems. The lack of resolution in several tales only further enhances a sense of the uncanny. Certain tales stand out: “Christmas Holiday, 1945” beautifully conveys the anxiety and jubilation of the first Christmas after the war’s end, “Marooned in Marrakesh” and “Recluse” feature people in desperate straits who command the reader’s sympathy, and the character of Vincent Jackson feels like someone dreamed up by Johnny Cash or Kenny Rogers. Despite the occasional anachronism (such as a woman in the 1940s eating sesame chicken, which didn’t gain popularity until the ’70s), the stories set in the past are immersive and credibly rendered.
Mundane events acquire a magical quality in these engaging tales.Pub Date: April 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798234017741
Page Count: 154
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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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