A story of love and loyalty that takes time to get going but eventually finds a sharp moral focus.
An epistolary novella follows the struggles of a Greek American family and the Greek immigrant nanny who worked for them.
Cotsirilos’ protagonist is 66-year-old Nick Milonas, a married criminal defense lawyer in Southern California who’s the father of 17-year-old twins, Tessa and Maddie. He and Tessa clash over his defense of guilty clients, and Nick contemplates her emotional conclusions about criminality and justice with an attitude that swings between rashness and reflection. Over the course of a sleepless night, his musings are interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood with his Greek nanny, Xanthi, who died in 1994. Her daughter, Koula, recently sent Nick bundles of letters that she and Xanthi sent each other over the years. Cotsirilos’ portrayal of Nick’s relationships with his wife and daughters feels somewhat superficial. However, he strikes a more nuanced and purposeful tone in Xanthi’s letters, which are familial and sympathetic. As Nick reads through the correspondence, readers catch glimpses of American life as seen through an immigrant’s eyes, as Xanthi gingerly entrusts her fate to the Milonas family and becomes an indispensable maternal figure. Just as importantly, readers get flashes of Xanthi’s life in war-torn Greece, which starkly contrasts with the lush surroundings of mid-20th-century America. Over the course of the novella, Xanthi hints at a grisly past that she’s kept from everyone around her, but she eventually confesses her darkest secret to teenage Nick before leaving the family for good. Xanthi leaves Nick, and the reader, with a question to puzzle over: “Are courage and honesty the same? Or do they eat one another.” This novella tackles the relationship between justice and morality and asserts that, above all, “the human story needs a champion.” Ultimately, however, it offers more questions than answers.
A story of love and loyalty that takes time to get going but eventually finds a sharp moral focus.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9916037-1-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Los Galesburg Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2022
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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