A moving portrait of the ways people survive palpable, harrowing grief.
A small town in northern Maine grieves the sudden death of a woman with postpartum depression.
Bowring’s second novel revisits the same town and characters from her debut, The Road to Dalton (2023). It’s five years later, 1995. “On the surface, nothing has really changed in Dalton since Bridget killed herself” at age 26, months after her first child, Sophie, was born. Below the surface, her death has transformed life for much of the town. As with her first novel, Bowring shifts perspective to a different character in each short chapter. It’s a large and lively cast. Many can hardly find time to grieve while parenting and working. Bridget’s husband, Nate, has quit the police force to work a mindless job in the Frazier lumber mill, owned by Bridget’s father. Bridget’s mother, Annette, is now an alcoholic and home-shopping-network addict. Old friends and lovers Bev (Nate’s mother) and Trudy, each married to a different man, are still together. Their love is tested when Trudy must care for her husband, Richard, after he has a heart attack. Bowring doesn’t create much tension in this novel, and there is no major twist or surprise. The focus is on the subtleties of her characters’ hearts and minds. At times, key character traits are repeated too often, as people are mired in comforting bad habits. But Bowring brilliantly evokes people’s inner lives through small, illuminating moments, not unlike Sherwood Anderson, and fills the novel with thoughtful and comic one-liners that ring true. Her love for these characters is apparent on every page, shining brightest in the tough but tender relationship Bev and Trudy share. “Bev can’t believe that tiny word—us—can contain so much. All their love and all their stories. All their hopes and all their sorrows.”
A moving portrait of the ways people survive palpable, harrowing grief.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798889660439
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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