A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut.
Shame and miscommunication drive wedges between loving siblings at turning points in their lives.
The Irish American family of the title runs a successful pub bearing their name in a small New York town. They’re close-knit, but most of them keep shameful secrets from each other. Father Mickey worries he has dementia (and has never talked about his past Irish Republican Army connections); oldest son Denny is stressed because he’s about to open a second pub for which he has borrowed a lot of money via sketchy methods and because his wife has moved out. His brothers, artistic Jackie and Shane, who’s intellectually disabled but a hardworking bundle of energy, are both haunted by the abrupt and mysterious departure to California five years ago of their sister, Sunday. Now she’s home, recuperating from a drunken car wreck but enigmatic as ever, which is really stressing out Denny’s best friend and business partner, Kale Collins, who is also Sunday’s former fiance. He might have moved on to marriage and fatherhood, but the torch he carries for Sunday is hot enough to burn down both their houses. Lange builds the plot by switching to a different character’s point of view in each chapter, giving the reader angles on events that are sometimes intriguingly different. The Brennan men, including Kale, who pretty much grew up with them, rally around Sunday when she’s threatened, although they do have a touch of toxic masculinity, tending to think of violent revenge as a solution, and sometimes acting on it. The Brennan matriarch, Maura, has been dead for several years when the story begins, but her influence plays a surprising role. The Brennans find redemption, but Lange doesn’t wrap things up too neatly—some of those old secrets have new echoes.
A family must face its own secrets to deal with crisis in a well-crafted debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-79622-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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