Ambitious and thematically important, if convoluted.
An intergenerational examination of trauma, legacy, magic, and memory in the Black American experience.
This novel opens with an appalling act. Tsitra, a young mother living in Detroit, is hacked to death by her infant son’s grandmother in a misguided attempt to provoke radical change. Thousands of miles away, in Texas, the pain of losing her daughter puts Tsitra’s mother, Blue, into a kind of suspended animation for 18 months. When she emerges, she travels to The Ranch—“a little-known silent retreat center in the Texas desert run by a Catholic order”—hoping to find some enlightenment. Instead, she arrives at a “zero-point energy field,” a place of tremendous power designed by her shape-shifting ancestor, Amanda, to facilitate Blue’s rebirth and the cleansing of the family line from the wasting curse of poverty. As Blue’s seven-day stay at The Ranch progresses, her narrative is spliced with the story of her lineage as it runs through the brutal legacies of American slavery—her mother, who was raised in pitiless cycles of abuse; her father, who escaped a Mississippi lynch mob; her grandmother Amanda, whose magic powers descend from her own enslaved mother. Meanwhile, another tale unspools involving the powerful Amanda and the haughty Creole woman Ismay, who meet in 1848 and seek to understand the legacy of race for both their ancestors and progeny through a complicated equation of time travel and magical identity theft. Though this summary is dauntingly complex, it's only a sample of this ambitious novel’s many convolutions. The central theme of the book is the devastating impact wrought upon a people who have been stripped of their cultural history—“The worst thing that slavery did for [its] victims...was the rewrite of their story,” Amanda says. “Slaveholders only passed down stories of misery, ineptitude, and failure. This erasure wrecked us.” This message could not come at a more pertinent time in the U.S., where the forced erasure of Black history and identity is once again seen as an acceptable strategy in governance. Unfortunately, in spite of its laudable intentions, the novel combines an unwieldy plot with a marked tendency to rely on exposition that, even in the mouths of well-realized characters, sounds more like an academic lecture than dialogue any character—even an all-knowing one—would utter.
Ambitious and thematically important, if convoluted.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781419767104
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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