A dazzling collection of stories covering rough emotional terrain.
Lancelotta chronicles life’s dissatisfactions in this short fiction collection.
A pregnant teen and her boyfriend hit the road with a bag of stolen cash to build a life for themselves and their imminent child, unaware of how migratory and lonely that life will be for all three of them. A married mother with a teenage daughter gets caught up in the memories of her own youth, particularly of her brother’s terminal disease and the peculiar pressures it put on her and her friends. A woman caring for her rapidly declining husband can’t help but resent her parents, wealthy octogenarians in perfect health. A baker reflects on her relationship with a much older man who remains devastated by the maiming of his piano-playing son. In these 15 stories, the author explores the many ways that life can go off course, whether from small miscalculations made long ago or small acts of cruelty committed in the present. “Those birthdays,” rues one narrator, caught up in the cycling years of her life; “by the thirty-fifth the slide had started, merrily relentless; the march and tick of indifference even though my hair was still shiny my legs still long my mouth still warm and wet” (“A Little Mercy”). Lancelotta's sentences read like poetry, as here in the opener about the pregnant teenage couple: “The traffic light at the intersection flashes yellow and the spindly pines stab black at the resting sky and where they are is the beating heart of everything waiting for them. They believe this. They are too young not to” (“You Are Here”). These stories masterfully evoke life’s inevitable slippage, the way a personal history is composed of moments that either burn brightly in one’s memory or disappear entirely. Standout pieces include “The Anniversary Trip” and “Ambivalence,” but every story here deserves to be read slowly and carefully, with time allotted to recover in between.
A dazzling collection of stories covering rough emotional terrain.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1573662017
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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