A slow but enthralling melodrama that deftly captures life in the south.
This debut historical novel follows two small-town American families’ lives throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
Young Elane Toogood hails from “the Annex” in her southern community of Lickskillet, where Black families and “poor white trash” live; nasty people call her the latter. She befriends Charlotte Frost sometime in the 1940s when the girls are teens. Charlotte’s daughter, Ali, and Elane’s daughter, Bee, born months apart, become best friends; it is they who will become the focus of the narrative as they grow up watching history take shape throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from President Nixon resigning on TV to the moon landing. But life passes by right there in their small town as well: Elane works as a maid in Ali’s household and is the accepted disciplinarian of both girls, and various family members endure the ramblings of Ali’s hateful, bigoted grandfather, Rayford Applewhite (Charlotte’s stepfather). White delivers the text using multiple voices as individual characters narrate the myriad chapters, with Ali headlining the bulk of them. There are fun nods to the era (“We dressed up as Sonny and Cher”), acknowledging the popularity of drive-in movies and (the original) Star Trek TV series, as well as entertaining anecdotes, like Ali’s transaction with a classmate, swapping a pair of binoculars for a parakeet that annoys both her mom and Elane. Some of the occurrences described, however, are drably routine; Ali teases an “adventure” with Bee, which is merely running errands with her grandmother. The author excels at nuanced details, noting the array of smells at a county fair and the colorful fruits inside canning jars on store shelves. The final act takes a surprising and convincing turn that brings this decades-long narrative to a satisfying close.
A slow but enthralling melodrama that deftly captures life in the south.Pub Date: April 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798886836318
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2023
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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