This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.
Is Susan Straight the bard of Southern California literature?
In her eighth novel—she has also written a memoir and a collection of linked stories as well as a book for young readers—the author stakes her claim. A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work, it begins (how could it not?) on the freeway, “a Thursday in October,” a highway patrol officer named Johnny Frias tells us. “Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other.” Johnny is one of several protagonists in Straight’s novel, which flows from first to third person and life to life as if to embody the instability of the region it evokes. The notion of Southern California as elusive, beset by wind and traffic, is hardly a new one; it infuses the work of writers such as Joan Didion and Carolyn See. Straight, however, is operating in a different register, one attuned less to Los Angeles than to the sprawl that surrounds it, extending into the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley. Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply. Here, that means not only Johnny, but also Ximena, an undocumented domestic worker, and Matelasse, whose husband leaves her with two young sons not long before the Covid-19 pandemic begins. “Black acres of sandy field,” Straight describes the landscape, “the corral where his grandfather’s horses and the bull named Coalmine used to live. Then the arroyo, and the foothills.”
This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0451-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
