An entertaining and thoughtful group of stories.
Clark offers a collection of city-based short stories exploring themes of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, and loss.
These 10 vignettes excavate interior musings and relationships between spouses, parents, and children; most of the stories center around marriage. In the title story, a writer and lifelong New Yorker ponders the main character of a story he is working on as he gets his young son ready for school and reminisces about his wife. “For the Love Of Wasabi Peas” is a poignant portrait of a couple that has married three times and divorced twice as they are on the verge of their third divorce. (“When you fall in love, no matter how old you become, how many years pass, a part of you remains that age for each other forever, no matter what.”) In “His Day at the Beach” and “The Reunion,” divorced fathers grapple with the distances between them and their sons. (“I could lose her. But my kids, my boys? I had to lie down. My heart was beating so fast I thought I’d die, and I couldn’t do that and leave them unprotected.”) “The Revenge Fund” is a marked contrast; in this tale, a young woman is the only one of her friends denied entrance to a club. (“The buzzard doesn’t think she can hear him, says out the side of his mouth, ‘Face Control.’ He’s referring to her. It’s her face that’s being controlled. Being excluded, shut out.”) When she gets an unexpected and large inheritance the following week, she takes elaborate and satisfying revenge on the buzzardlike bouncer. In his first collection of short stories, Clark deftly depicts people of varying ages and perspectives. The conversations throughout are sharp and authentic, as are the interior monologues that illuminate the motives and actions of characters. For the most part, the stories take place in New York City and its environs, with witty evocations of its gruff reputation; even “A Last Stroll Through Her Favorite City,” set in Paris, includes this shout-out: “How unlike New York, a woman just smiled at me for no reason.”
An entertaining and thoughtful group of stories.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798990416727
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Black Note Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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