A novel that can’t decide how seriously we should take its psychologically damaged characters.
In this provocative debut novel, a woman reflects on her relationship with her brother as he’s dying of brain cancer.
After their mother took her own life by walking into Long Island Sound and their father unravels from grief, Ava and Demetri, only a year apart in age, practically raise themselves. Demetri, a precocious kid, heads off to Harvard, and Ava, a talented painter, tags along, sleeping under his bed. Ava believes their identities are so entwined that she falls apart when Demetri starts dating: “It never occurred to me…that Demetri would be attracted to someone without me. Because different desires would make us what we were not—namely, two separate people.” Ava’s solution is to insert herself into all of Demetri’s relationships, convincing his love interests to slip out of their clothes and pose for nude portraits. Her greatest victory (and shame) is when she finds herself actually falling in love with one of these women. Desiring the same woman, it turns out, drives them apart. Ava is a thoroughly unsympathetic narrator, which is not itself a problem. Writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, and Elizabeth Strout have created memorably difficult female protagonists. And yet, through absurdity and humor, the slow revelation of pathos, or searing social critique, their novels both wink at readers and nudge them to stop being so judgmental. It’s hard to know how we’re supposed to understand Dess’ novel, which satirizes the contemporary art world—Ava’s first major sale is a series of paintings literally produced as she’s having sex with men—and perhaps Ava, too, though her narcissism starts to feel thin and sad. Right before Demetri dies and he’s barely conscious, Ava shows him a portrait of their shared lover, seeking his approval one last time. It’s a painful scene to read.
A novel that can’t decide how seriously we should take its psychologically damaged characters.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593830826
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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