Ambiguity and irony curdle with unsettling results in an engaging story of early 2000s metropolitan Americana.
In D’Stair’s novel, a young woman cleans her great-grandmother’s untidy house and confronts the reality of her unfocused present.
It’s 2001, and for almost a year, 20-something Cora Freelene has been living rent-free with her cat, Chloe, in her late great-grandmother’s impossibly cluttered abode in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. She’s been tasked with cleaning and organizing the place, where 10-year-old TV Guides coexist with garish, clown-themed cookie jars and 1940s-era erotic photos. Cora struggles to complete her mission, even as the one-year deadline creeps closer, and it soon becomes clear that her boredom and frustration with life runs deep. She derives little satisfaction from her day job, which requires parsing Congressional hearings into terse sentences: “Glumly or with joy, either way, the abstract must come forth.” Her relationships with her coworkers are shallow and superficial, at best, but for a while, she entertains an interest in Roman, her favorite clerk at local Potomac Video. In some respects, this story comes across as the Generation X version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; however, instead of its protagonist vowing, “I would prefer not to,” Cora appears to want to do something else, but she isn’t sure what it is. D’Stair has fashioned a compassionate and very modern narrative, skillfully weaving together the threads of Cora’s dissatisfaction (“She always makes the wrong choice. What else could she have done?”) with a world that never stops intruding on her quiet life, particularly after Sept. 11, 2001. Her problems seem fated to overwhelm her—a problem that the author resolves in an unlikely but satisfying fashion. Despite its setting, this isn’t a glib Douglas Coupland–esque slacker-fest, but a more complex tale that readers will be glad they picked up.
Ambiguity and irony curdle with unsettling results in an engaging story of early 2000s metropolitan Americana.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798330422883
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Late Marriage Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
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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