A vulnerable, cleareyed portrait of humanity that could benefit from a wider scope.
Watts blends nostalgia and emotional honesty in these true-to-life poems.
Family is the focus of these poems as Watts spins ordinary moments into colorful tapestries. The author opens with “Snake I” and “Snake II,” recalling a grandmother, Ruth, who spent her entire life in a cabin in Elk Mountain and once treated the speaker’s snake bite. Watts captures gritty characters in stunning detail throughout the book. In “Ester,” the speaker remembers Uncle Ike, a relative bedridden from a coal-mining accident, and Aunt Ester, who gave the speaker old-fashioned trinkets. A complicated, ill fatherly figure appears in multiple poems. In “Dad II,” the speaker’s father tells a doctor through “lying lips” that he did not fall, then derides the medical profession. After her father dies from heart failure, the speaker suspects the prepaid crematorium scammed the deceased in “Dad III.” “Mrs. W” details a provocative neighbor who wears miniskirts, belly-baring tops, and bloodstained clothes. “Townsfolk” introduces readers to the local baker, grocer, and shoe seller, all exhibiting kindness in their own ways. The speaker reminisces about a long-gone bowling alley in “Hank,” named after its unusual maintenance man. An adult speaker with a heart condition wonders about the private life of her “Cardiologist” while signing surgery consent forms with trembling hands in “Surgeon.” “Artificial Intelligence” cloyingly considers all the things AI can’t do, like “savor / the warmth of a lap cat / gentle toll of distant bell / smell of home.” Watts’ striking poems are at once intimate and universal. Her characters come to life in evocative details, like the way Uncle Ike’s cough made “a clang like a peach pit / shot into a tuba’s throat.” Sensory-engaging descriptions limn how a screen door “whines, thuds shut” or snow boots “punch holes / through the ice-crusted sidewalks.” The bittersweet, insightful “Mothers” juxtaposes young moms’ woes (e.g., pregnancy weight) with an older, wiser speaker’s laments: “How useless / the fat / I carry around / on my hips / feels with no one / to prop there.” A quibble—the book seemingly catapults from childhood to late adulthood with little attention to the midlife experience.
A vulnerable, cleareyed portrait of humanity that could benefit from a wider scope.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2025
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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