A tenderhearted, if somewhat rushed, story of passion, radicalism, and moving on.
A middle-aged woman looks back on the romance of revolutionary politics in her youth in this novel.
In 1998, Celeste reflects on the past: “I arrived on the campus of the University of Florida in the fall of 1971, ready to join the fray….I wanted to be a part of those at the ragged fringe.” As she thinks back, her Florida home is threatened by raging wildfires along the state’s eastern coast. Her 14-year-old son, Evan, vacillates between moody and moodier; her mother, who has dementia, is living in a nursing home nearby. The last thing that she needs is her estranged brother, Reid, a poet, returning home after years of hitchhiking. But according to a verse that he scrawled on a postcard, he is, in fact, coming home, and Celeste must revisit and renegotiate her relationship with her free-spirited sibling. This conjures memories of Celeste’s revolutionary days, fighting in the streets with him when they were both students at the University of Florida in the early 1970s. She recalls protesting the Vietnam War, joining feminist consciousness-raising groups, and falling in love. Over the course of this novel, Egnoski employs plenty of humor and luscious detail to help to bring the world of protest politics to life, and along the way, she also manages to effectively relate the visceral passion of youth. Celeste herself is shown to be a smart, charming narrator (“Betty Friedan had been counting on me to change the world”). At the heart of the book is the protagonist’s struggle to forgive and to remember without losing herself. However, despite the book’s rich subject matter, it often breezes through key events, thus missing opportunities for greater emotional depth.
A tenderhearted, if somewhat rushed, story of passion, radicalism, and moving on.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951214-82-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2020
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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