A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.
A woman recalls her girlhood and adolescence through the lenses of family dysfunction and sexual assault.
The first novel by acclaimed poet and critic Manguso is a bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style. The narrator, Ruthie, recalls growing up in Massachusetts on poverty’s edge. Her father is snappish and distant; her mother’s quick to judge and deeply narcissistic. (“The doctor said, Oh, she’s beautiful, when he pulled me out, and my mother had thought he was talking about her.”) As the story moves into Ruthie’s teen years, the damage to her self-esteem begins to show: She’s anxious around anybody she sees as her betters (which is almost everyone) and sees bullying and ostracism as her due. The plainspokenness of her voice—recalling early Ann Beattie and the dirty realists—at once underplays the tension and suggests just how tightly coiled she is. By the time she enters high school, she’s exposed to a new ecosystem of sexualized mistreatment, from inappropriate touches to rape. Police officers, gym teachers, and family members all seem to be wired for exploitation. So her self-harm intensifies (she pulls out her eyelashes) alongside her awareness not just of sexual abuse, but of how common it is among those around her, which leads to the novel’s powerful conclusive revelations. Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things—her previous books were built around lyric essays on suicide and autoimmune disease, and here she depicts her protagonist’s quiet agony with a poet’s eye. (“My shame fell from the ceiling like snow.”) But the elegance doesn’t diminish the emotional impact of her story and the journey of becoming mature enough to understand transgression, be horrified by it, and search for a means to escape it.
A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-24122-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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
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
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