A cozy quilt of recycled rom-com tropes.
British babies born in the same hospital in the first minutes of New Years' Day 1990 meet again on their 30th birthdays.
"Look, Shaylene, I'm sure you've seen Sleepless in Seattle? You know that bit where Meg Ryan is supposed to meet Tom Hanks at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day? Well I'm in a situation a bit like that," pleads the likable but self-defeating pie entrepreneur Minnie Cooper during the climax of Cousens' debut. Yes, she certainly is, having struggled for more than 300 pages through every rom-com trope in the book. Her story begins on New Years' Eve 1989, when her mother, Connie, goes through labor with a waifish but well-heeled wardmate named Tara Hamilton. One of them will win a cash prize for giving birth to the first baby of 1990, and wouldn't you know, it's the rich lady who doesn't need the money. Not only that, she steals the lucky name Connie has chosen for her child: Quinn. Furious, the Coopers decide instead on Minnie, not realizing that this will subject their daughter to a lifetime of self-esteem–crushing car jokes. On the other hand, Minnie needs her self-esteem crushed so that when she runs into the rich, handsome, mensch-y Quinn Hamilton on their shared birthday 30 years later she can spend a year spontaneously generating one mistaken impression after another so the two don't just accept what fate so clearly intends for them. While Quinn and Minnie don't stray far from type, they are surrounded by an entertaining supporting cast—Minnie's irritating punster boyfriend; her amateur horologist dad; her employees at the not-for-profit pie bakery, particularly a platinum blond wastrel named Fleur. Mother Connie is a bit of a problem, though. Seething with resentment about the stolen name and other injustices, she's a cold and negative mother who passes the chip on her shoulder to her daughter—until something happens offstage and she turns into a completely different person. Not sure what movie this comes from, but it doesn't work.
A cozy quilt of recycled rom-com tropes.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-19120-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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