An impressive but dramatically muted blend of compelling art critique and glancing play-by-play of a life.
An artist experiences heartbreak and joy over the course of a long career in Dunlap’s story.
Wilson Armitage, a farm boy from rural Ohio, experiences a moment of profound transformation on a Future Farmers of America trip to the New York City World’s Fair in 1964. Encountering Michelangelo’s Pietà in person, he marvels at its strange beauty, as well as the devotion of a priest in line. From then on, “the worm had turned for him. The city was his future, the farm his past.” Ten years later, wielding a BFA in painting and printmaking from Ohio State University, he’s living in Soho with an “affordable summer rental” in the Hamptons. Renewing his commitment to his art, he moves to the Hamptons year-round and begins a painting practice that heralds his “meteoric rise to prominence.” A turning point in his career comes when he’s awarded the Rome Prize, which comes with a year-long, all-expenses-paid residency at the American Academy in Rome. In the Eternal City, he falls for an “Irish lass” named Cortland Milroy and experiences both great creative breakthroughs and personal tragedy. Upon his return to the States, he connects with his dying father. Dunlap’s careful research and attention to detail are obvious. His knowledge of both contemporary and classical art is capacious, and he uses an omniscient voice that flashes forward to tell readers what will happen: For instance, at the AAR, “the food was passable and would later be transformed to great advantage by Alice Waters and her Rome Sustainable Food Program.” All of this material, however, does not have the effect of making Wilson’s character feel multifaceted or fully present on the page. The plot simply progresses through his life, without much sense of tension or thwarted desires, and the very sparse dialogue means the story is told almost entirely in a distancing summary format. The ending is strangely abrupt, and readers may be distracted by components of the timeline, or by repeated references to “the fastidious Japanese.”
An impressive but dramatically muted blend of compelling art critique and glancing play-by-play of a life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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