An unsettling evocation of Cold War–era repression, whose legacy seems timelier than ever.
In Hutchison’s novel, a young Romanian woman finds renewed strength as her country’s regime unravels.
How is it possible to reclaim one’s humanity in a country with hidden microphones, informers, and secret police everywhere? This is the problem that 17-year-old Adriana Nicu and her best friend, Gabriela Martinescu, face in the final installment of the author’s Cold War trilogy, set during the final unwinding of Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu’s iron-fisted rule. The novel opens in September 1989, with the collapse of Communism in Poland—an event that bodes ill for an authoritarian regime that’s reeling from shortages of basic food items. For a time, Adriana finds solace in her studies, and in reading forbidden books by British and American authors. She draws particularly deep inspiration from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and its story of a determined attorney’s attempt to seek justice for a Black man: “We need courageous people who will stand up to injustice,” says Adriana’s cousin. “Like the lawyer in that book.” However, as dissent sweeps the Eastern Bloc, it’s unclear whether Adriana and her newfound friends from Students for a Free Romania will ever find an outlet for their frustrations—until events on the ground, such as the abrupt disappearance of a dear old friend working on a building project, begin to suggest otherwise. Over the course of this novel, Hutchison delivers a skillfully crafted narrative that is by turns comic and caustic; its main characters’ fortunes effectively zigzag between triumph to terror, which captures the arbitrary nature of authoritarian regimes everywhere. Also, as antidemocratic extremism gains ground in various places in the real world, this novel will remind readers of the power of resilience, and its ability to flip even the bleakest of political scripts: “They didn’t have anything real, like weapons. Only abstract things, like hope.”
An unsettling evocation of Cold War–era repression, whose legacy seems timelier than ever.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798218512781
Page Count: 336
Publisher: TRH Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
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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