A dystopian novel that seems all too real.
A Ukrainian woman strives to rise to the top of the international fertility racket but miscalculates how close she can skirt criminality without becoming either a target or a criminal herself.
We first see Olenka, the narrator, in 2016 in a Helsinki dog park, where she’s observing a certain young family. The timeline pleats and folds in on itself according to Olenka’s memories and fears. Olenka is from Snizhne, a polluted town in eastern Ukraine, where most inhabitants earn a subsistence living. Many work in illegal, unregulated coal mines known as kopankas, where accidents run rampant, which is ostensibly how her beloved father died. Olenka and her widowed mother were reduced from relatively comfortable circumstances to living with relatives engaged in the lower echelons of opium farming. Now, Daria, a former colleague, has joined Olenka in Helsinki, much to Olenka’s chagrin. The two were involved in an outwardly legitimate, extremely profitable fertility institute which furnished egg donors and surrogates to the exacting specifications of wealthy clients—including the dog park family. Both women—whose fathers were friends in Snizhne days—saw fertility work as their main chance to escape poverty. Olenka is in Finland under an assumed name, and Daria’s arrival poses a threat: If Olenka’s whereabouts were known, she would be in mortal danger, even from the man she loves, whom she addresses as “you” in incessant mental conversations. The thriller aspect sneaks up on the reader as information is tortuously eked out about Olenka’s at-first unwitting ties to a clan of ruthless oligarchs. Oksanen subtly but viscerally depicts jeopardy and romance without resorting to graphic descriptions. As suspense mounts, occasionally at the expense of coherence, we learn much about the precarious state of post-Soviet Ukraine and its chaotic economy, in which gangsterism rules, violence is celebrated, and exploitation of women is big business.
A dystopian novel that seems all too real.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65947-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
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
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