An empathetic and sobering look at the price women of the 1950s sometimes paid for desire.
Two ambitious young Black women struggle with the consequences of unplanned pregnancies in post–World War II America.
Ruby Pearsall, one of the two main characters of this historical novel, wants to become a doctor. She’s only 14, but she’s already set herself on the path to her dream as a student in a demanding special program that she hopes will earn her a college scholarship. Her mother is indifferent, her father absent, but Ruby has her own determination and the warm support of her Aunt Marie, a nightclub performer who takes the girl in when her mother kicks her out. Distraction strikes, though, in the person of Shimmy, the son of Aunt Marie’s Jewish landlord, who falls madly in love with Ruby despite her efforts to remind him of the perils of interracial romance in Philadelphia in 1949. Eleanor Quarles, the book’s other main character, is a few years older than Ruby. She’s already in college, at Howard University in Washington, and happily starting to pursue a career as an archivist in the school’s library. It’s there that she meets William Pride Jr., a handsome, charming medical student whose attention to her seems almost like a dream—until she meets his family. They’re part of the city’s wealthy, accomplished Black elite, and Eleanor, who’s from a blue-collar family in small-town Ohio, feels out of her element. What’s more, unlike Eleanor, almost everyone in William’s social orbit is light-skinned enough to pass for White. William’s ferociously snobbish mother, Rose, does not see Eleanor as a potential bride for her son, but William is in love. Both young women get pregnant. For Eleanor, that leads to marriage but not happiness; for Ruby, it leads to a stint in a nightmarish maternity home for unwed mothers. The events that will create a bond between the two are telegraphed a little too early, and the plot sometimes bogs down. But the engaging main characters and wealth of historical detail carry the novel forward.
An empathetic and sobering look at the price women of the 1950s sometimes paid for desire.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9736-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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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