A varied and well-written collection despite the disappointing portrayals of women.
A debut volume of short stories focuses on history, glamour, and crime in America and abroad.
Maitland-Lewis’ collection opens with a fictional episode in the life of Ernest Simpson, the ex-husband of Wallis Simpson, whose divorce allowed her to marry former British King Edward VIII in 1937. Now 62 years old, Ernest is down on his luck—his tie is “tied in a strategically positioned Windsor knot to mask its frayed places,” and his Manhattan rent is in arrears. He wants a famed New York City newspaper to, among other things, pay him and help him write his memoir in exchange for providing letters that show he “changed the history of the world.” This claim piques the interest of the paper’s editors to learn what these documents offer. “Mr. Simpson” is one of many pieces of historical fiction in this collection that involve royalty, Nazis, and/or Ivy League universities. Although one story is set on a decidedly stark New Zealand sheep farm, most locations glitter, including a five-star hotel in Geneva, a Fifth Avenue co-op, and a sun-drenched California freeway (with a bright red Ferrari, no less). The writing is clean and strong, and the ages of the central characters span from college age to a certain age and nine decades or older. High-end product placement permeates the volume—for example, a dowager wears vintage Cartier diamond jewelry, a man admires his new Patek Phillipe watch, and a woman sports thigh-high Saint Laurent boots. Themes of loss (money, lovers, youth) and unrealized potential weave through the intriguing and wide-ranging stories, as do incidents of blackmail and experiences with antisemitism. But with few exceptions, women fare poorly in the tales. Female characters include a nymphomaniac, strippers, sex workers, a former porn star, a woman who fakes a pregnancy to trap a rich husband, a would-be murderer, a successful killer, and a “fat, bulbous”-lipped girlfriend who’s “a pain in the ass.” One character pretty well sums up the treatment of women in the book with this statement: “Women are like mangoes. They are either green, ripe, or rotten.”
A varied and well-written collection despite the disappointing portrayals of women.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hildebrand Books
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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