While a bit repetitive, this captivating tale about a curious relationship will keep readers guessing.
A literary novel focuses on the distinctive relationship of two disparate souls.
Brigitte Weichmann, 48, is in Dijon, France. When readers first meet her, she is attending a support group for people dealing with loss. French is not Brigitte’s native language, and although the German woman sometimes stumbles with her words, she gets her point across: She is mourning the death of her only son, Michael. It is in the support group that she meets Christian Rolland. Christian, 35, is still getting over his divorce from a woman named Sylvie. Christian runs a bookshop in town and there is nothing that he loves more than reading. Brigitte, on the other hand, does not read. She has a penchant for musicals, particularly ones made before 1970. She is also a woman of immense wealth who can travel wherever she pleases. Despite this option, she decides to rent an apartment in Dijon. But where is her time with Christian leading? Brigitte is sometimes confused about the status of her own marriage to a factory owner named Hans. Perhaps she should go back to Hans. Or maybe she just needs more time to think about Michael. The desire to see what happens with Brigitte and Christian keeps Dragnić’s engaging story moving. Even deep into the book—translated from German by the author and Rose—the two characters’ fate remains a mystery. Will they fall in love? Have a falling out? Brigitte’s oddities add to her appeal. She is a woman who “would like to live in the black and white world of a black and white movie.” But a great deal about these characters winds up being repeated. For instance, readers already know about Christian’s divorce and yet he is keen to tell Brigitte flatly of what happened to his wife: “We’re divorced.” Likewise, readers are regularly reminded that Brigitte’s son is dead, a point that tends to eventually lose its dramatic impact. The intrigue comes not from the main characters’ pasts but their intertwined future.
While a bit repetitive, this captivating tale about a curious relationship will keep readers guessing.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9798338277027
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 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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