A powerful collection of intimate, heart-wrenching stories.
Silman’s short stories intricately explore themes of family, grief, and aging.
In “Here We Go Again, Alice,” Joereflects on his childhood and his older sister’s untimely death as he comes to grips with his wife’s pregnancy and his impending transition into parenthood. In “Labyrinth of Love,” set in the late 1950s, Muffie lands her first job after college, which leads to a sexual awakening and a relationship with a wealthy but insecure man. Dinah, in “The Scent of Lilacs,” processes her grief after the death of her husband and father of her two children, Max and Addie. In 2019, as Vera Schoenfeld reaches the age of 70, she opens her home as a B&B and strikes up a friendship with Simon Lang, a 76-year-old who becomes a long-term boarder (“Bed and Breakfast”). Laura appears in multiple stories, including one about hiking through Europe with her husband and their three kids, aged 5 through 13 (“On the Way to Courmayeur”); watching her children grow up (“Touchstone”) and contending with her elderly parents’ mortality (“Heart-work”) and with getting older herself (“The Sugar Road”). Silman’s collection of 16 short stories explores heavy but universal themes. Many characters are college-educated writers living in or around New York:They’re each their own person and easily distinguishable from one another. Throughout, the stories offer masterful and authentic representation of the Jewish American experience. The author’s deep characterization of Laura is especially compelling as she navigates marriage and motherhood. The tales focusing on Laura’s relationship with her parents—particularly her ill and dying father—are also engaging (“My Chilean Playwright”; “Her Father’s Voice” ;the title story). Readers will also lose themselves in the author’s evocative prose as they become immersed in each chapter, as in a description of an artist in “My Chilean Playwright”: “In the morning light bathing her face she has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. A brilliant sky-blue that she never uses in her work. Is that because there are no blue fruits or vegetables, or because she has enough blue in her life?”
A powerful collection of intimate, heart-wrenching stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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