A heartbreaking and penetrating coming-of-age debut.
An artist contemplates her complex relationship with her best friend.
Wambugu’s debut novel opens with Ruth, a successful painter, grappling with the absence of her friend: “When I met Maria, I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live.” The rest of the novel moves back in time to unravel the roots of that obsession. Their story opens in their poor Pawtucket, Rhode Island, neighborhood when Ruth—the quiet, sheltered daughter of emotionally distant Kenyan immigrants—meets Maria, a gifted Panamanian orphan staying with her mentally ill aunt. Nearly a decade later, the girls graduate from their Catholic high school and attend Bard College, a small liberal arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley, to study art: painting and film, respectively. As Maria carves out a space within the overwhelmingly rich and white social circles, Ruth finds herself on the outskirts of her friendship with Maria—and even her own life. When Ruth, Maria, and Sheila, Maria’s wealthy girlfriend, move to New York City after graduation, a gulf begins to open between the friends. While Ruth struggles to make her art and a living, Maria continues to find professional and social success. Their hard-to-define relationship faces the ultimate test when they have to decide what, if anything, they are willing to give up for each other. The novel shows all the ways that their friendship—warm and cold, tender and terrible—exists in the area between extremes. Maria takes up an outsized space in Ruth’s life, and Ruth allows herself to be at the whims of Maria’s wants or needs. Despite hurting each other, they are bonded in a way that only long-term female friends seem capable of—and this novel distills this dynamic with devastating precision. Writing beautifully about ambition, class, art, domesticity, identity, and complacency, Wambugu’s prose is as striking as it is sure.
A heartbreaking and penetrating coming-of-age debut.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780316581332
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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