A smart, sweeping story about the abuse and transformation of a culture stripped of its country.
The aftereffects of the oppression of Tibetans across two continents and six decades powers this domestic epic.
Lama’s debut novel opens in 1960, a decade after China’s invasion of Tibet and shortly after a quelled uprising and exile of the Dalai Lama. Lhamo and Tenkyi, two sisters, are forced to leave for a refugee camp in Nepal and orphaned not long after. From there, the girls’ paths diverge: Lhamo remains in Nepal as the camp becomes a tent city, has a daughter, and attempts to maintain the spiritual traditions stamped out by the Chinese. Bookish Tenkyi, meanwhile, leaves for Canada and, by 2012, takes in Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, an aspiring scholar of Tibetan culture. The non-Tibetan academics Dolma meets are knowledgeable but also condescending, and Westerners’ callousness toward her heritage is symbolized by a statue of a “Nameless Saint” that Dolma believes is a stolen family heirloom. Dolma’s investigations bring her deeper into her family history, the ethically messy artifacts trade, and Tibetan spirituality, culminating in a trek to the edge of the country she’s exiled from. Lama’s delivery can be somewhat stiff—romantic interludes feel flat, and Dolma’s dialogue is sometimes sodden with explication of Tibetan political history and spiritual practice. But the novel thrives as a story about sisterhood, parenthood, and the heart-piercing feeling of exile. Dolma can’t bring herself to admire Toronto’s “Little Tibet” neighborhood, which she sees as a “copy of a copy of home. Another temporary stop in an endless journey.” (The frustrations are exemplified by Tenkyi's dashed hopes of becoming a teacher; she works as a hotel housekeeper.) And Lama wisely gives the novel multiple narrators—Lhamo, Tenkyi, Dolma, and Samphel, a childhood friend of the sisters—who capture the breadth of Tibetan culture and the range of emotional impacts of separation.
A smart, sweeping story about the abuse and transformation of a culture stripped of its country.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-641-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
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
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