A sometimes-frustrating but often effective bildungsroman.
In Sleeper’s debut novel, a young journalist travels to Japan in search of her troubled lover.
Lucy is a young woman who knows little of the world outside of books—she majored in both journalism and literature, “semi-expecting to become a reporter after college”—and she mostly keeps to herself. However, as she heads into her final year at Northwestern University in Illinois,she finds herself on a new path when her family fractures in the wake of her father’s sudden death. She also falls in love with a confident new Japanese student named Owen Ota and becomes fascinated by his home country. Owen tells her that he is a “gaijin”—a term for foreigner that some find derogatory—and even goes so far as to say that he feels out of place in his own family. Just as the college students’ relationship deepens, Owen suddenly returns to Japan, and after that, the two communicate little. Lucy becomes obsessed with finding him, and while working at the Chicago Sun-Times, she applies to be a reporter for a small newspaper in Okinawa, Japan. After she’s hired but right before she moves, she learns that Owen tried to kill himself before disappearing once again—adding yet another layer to his mystery. Sleeper’s novel is predominantly the story of Lucy's coming-of-age as she learns that the object of her obsession is far from the perfect man she imagines him to be. The author also shows how Lucy learns that reading about a foreign country doesn’t prepare an outsider for its complicated reality: “I wasn’t just a green reporter, I was a green person, a product of my insular suburban upbringing.” She uses the word sensei in reference to Owen, as she feels that he’s become her teacher in life; however, as the story goes on, the author gets across the sense that everyone Lucy encounters is her teacher, so deep is her naiveté. At times, the depiction of Lucy’s confusion can feel overly repetitive. However, by the end of the novel, Sleeper makes a strong case for adventure as the ultimate instructor.
A sometimes-frustrating but often effective bildungsroman.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947041-67-7
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
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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