A powerful tale of the many ways love can go wrong.
In this literary novel, a man seeks to uncover the vacation romance that resulted in his birth.
In 1979, Grace Rolston flies to Hawaii not long after her Hollywood director husband asked her for a divorce. Grace was carrying on a not-so-secret affair, to be sure, but Nick Rolston is no easy man to live with. She’s planning to do a bit of soul-searching on Oahu, but she packs a .38 revolver in her suitcase just in case the trip doesn’t go as planned. Alone on the veranda of the Pickering Club, she asks a brooding man for a cigarette. Well, the first thing she asks him is actually “What happened to your finger?” Peter Lee Corbet is missing a finger. He says it’s a long story. Everything with Lee is a long story. He doesn’t have a cigarette, but he leads Grace on an adventure to bum one from the kitchen staff, and so begins a whirlwind romance between two damaged people far from home. Years later, shortly before her death, Grace tells her adult child that he is not, in fact, Nick’s son as he’s always assumed. That son, who narrates the novel, resolves to discover the truth of what happened in Hawaii: How Grace and Lee came together and why he has never heard of the man until now. Zettler’s prose is razor-sharp, especially the dialogue: “Lee had never disclosed any specifics about the day he lost his finger. No one ever seemed to get the details….‘It’s depressing as hell and it’s never going to bring Cokely or Hanratty back to their families. Not in a million years. So what is the goddamned point?’ ” The author excels at hinting at his characters’ backstories in a way that provides them with uncommon depth and whets readers’ appetites to learn more. The audience can more or less guess where things are going, but the journey is surprising and worthwhile. For a book with a premise straight out of an Elvis Presley song, it packs an unexpected emotional punch.
A powerful tale of the many ways love can go wrong.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-92-596558-2
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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