A lively, if befuddling, novel that will challenge even the most diligent readers.
Stevens offers a dreamlike exploration of an extraordinary woman’s relationship with her erratic therapist.
Naomi Billingsley is an eccentric older woman based, with her equally eccentric husband, known only as Mr. Billingsley, in Mayfield, somewhere in the midwestern United States. She regularly visits a therapist named Dr. Birnteller, who regards his new patient as having symptoms that fall “somewhere within the grey area between psychiatric explanation and the supernatural or mystical.” The strange occurrences surrounding her are certainly too numerous to explain away as ordinary; for example, she survives an open bullet wound on her forehead after a routine fight with her husband, who survives equally terrible injuries. At another point, she predicts her own escape from prison, which occurs due to a mysterious earthquake. Mr. Billingsley, meanwhile, slowly turns into an aquatic creature with scales. The setting is absurdist, with characters able to take a wrong turn into Central America off a U.S. highway exit. Dr. Birnteller tries different psychiatric approaches to understand the various impossibilities in the lives of Naomi and those around her; he oscillates between accepting the surreality and suggesting more rational explanations. But Naomi soon begins to suspect that her therapist might be more eccentric than her or her spouse; he holds one of their later sessions in his office astride a white horse, decked out in a suit of armor. Stevens presents a brief, if meandering, novel in which readers never get a firm sense of the characters or their motivations. Still, the title figure’s adventures are intriguing to follow and are nearly impossible to predict; indeed, each turn this story takes is a surprise. The characters are less charmingly quirky than they are incomprehensible, however, and the lines of reality are constantly blurred, such that readers will often have trouble getting their bearings. Readers will be left with far more questions than answers at the conclusion of Naomi’s tale, which many may find unsatisfying.
A lively, if befuddling, novel that will challenge even the most diligent readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 127
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
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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