Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.
O’Leary offers two intimate novellas set in Ireland, separated by half a century.
The first novella, “An Unspoken Peace,” focuses on Conor Fenney, a young Irish American man from Chicago who yearns to connect with his ancestors’ past. In 1969, Conor attends summer school at Trinity College, where he meets his rakish, well-to-do roommate, Aidan. What results is a chronicle of concealed queer desire and grief that blurs the contours of male companionship, interspersed with detailed gestures toward Irish histories and landscapes. Fifty years later, in 2019, an unnamed, aging man in “The Galway Girl” returns to Ireland to visit the Cliffs of Moher following the death of his wife of 45 years. There he meets Brooke, a 33-year-old American woman training to be a counselor for “young people with addiction issues.” The two form an unlikely, quiet connection bounded by their limited time together as they travel through Galway for a single day. These are simple, straightforward stories that present tender moments of human connection. However, the prose is often monotonous and unvaried; the narration lacks nuance, turning something as simple as “warm stew...weak on the meat, but strong on potatoes” into Conor’s unchallenged speculation that “the cook was trying to make up for all the years the potatoes failed the Irish.” Most interestingly, the collection immediately establishes a tenuous connection between the two novellas, the first noting from its very beginning that Conor was 17 when he first visited Ireland and still reminisces about his encounter 50 years later. Meanwhile, the aging male character in “The Galway Girl” remarks that he “went to Trinity College in Dublin for a summer session right out of high school,” just as Conor does in “An Unspoken Peace.” Although there’s little elaboration upon the connections between Conor and his ostensible older self, it is perhaps this blank space between the two novellas that rings most painfully true to life—much goes unspoken, and much comes undone.
Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.Pub Date: March 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-1733534147
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Swan Creek Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
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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