A realistic but slow-paced story about love, loss, and tenacity.
Forney explores one woman’s emotional turbulence in the years following the events of September 11, 2001, in Forney’s debut novel.
Erin and Daniel are a young couple who fall in love hard and fast in college. She’s from a tightly wound family from Texas with high expectations, and he comes from a large, more easygoing family in the Bronx. Despite their different backgrounds, “There was something about the two of them that fit. It was easy, comfortable.” After getting married, they move to New York City together, where Erin is a lawyer and Daniel works at an investment bank in the World Trade Center. However, an argument results in Erin’s going on vacation to Spain with a friend, rather than attending Daniel’s mother’s birthday party. While overseas, Erin witnesses the Twin Towers fall on a television in the hotel bar. Shock gives way to panic as she desperately tries to reach Daniel and get home. When Erin finally returns, the novel chronicles her stages of grief from denial to anger to self-destruction. As time passes, she increasingly abuses alcohol and pills to try to numb her pain and even considers suicide. After spending copious amounts of money on unnecessary items, she finally gets one of several wake-up calls that force her to reckon with her life. Over the course of the novel, Forney mostly follows Erin as she spirals out of control. The monotony of her self-destruction does accurately reflect the affect of a depressed person. However, it also affects the momentum of the narrative, which often feels excessively slow. Ultimately, though, the novel effectively relates a love story about a marriage that’s imperfect but everlasting, and about the guilt that comes when we survive and must keep on living. Toward the end of the novel, Erin reflects, “Freedom was her fate. It walked hand in hand with loneliness,” and readers follow her as she decides whether to let her spirit break or to find the strength to keep going.
A realistic but slow-paced story about love, loss, and tenacity.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-742177-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2021
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
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