Smart, tough-minded, and passionate: a pleasure from start to finish.
Two Brooklyn women forge identities and careers in their rapidly gentrifying borough.
Narrator Alicia Canales Forten, an aspiring writer/director currently writing ad copy, is the offspring of a fleeting romance between her working-class Puerto Rican mother and a father from the Black elite who sees his daughter two weeks a year at his parents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard. La Garza is a Fort Greene legend for her fabulous parties and the impending initial public offering of her eponymous fashion label. At first Alicia can’t figure out why glamorous La Garza goes out of her way to befriend her, even if they’re neighbors in the funky area between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that houses many young people of color striving to get ahead. She soon learns that La Garza wants to reconnect with Alicia’s cousin Devon, a married Wall Streeter who was her first love. As in her previous two novels, Gonzalez trains a razor-sharp eye on class and racial distinctions, particularly in Alicia’s conflict over whether she really wants to marry her medical student fiancé and settle into the Black bourgeoisie, and in La Garza’s reckless affair with Devon. Longtime Brooklynites will enjoy recognizing the local businesses and landmarks Gonzalez name-checks, from Cake Man Raven to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower sign, but any reader can appreciate the authenticity of her salty voice and the changing cityscape it describes, as neighborhood landmarks are torn down to make way for condos and boutiques. Her bracing point of view animates a propulsive storyline strung with memorable characters, among them Devon’s buttoned-up wife, Marla (tougher than she seems), and shady, mobbed-up “stockbroker” Augusts Jankovskis, who has ulterior motives for financially backing La Garza. Devon’s sexy colleague, Matteo Jones, who tempts Alicia to forget she’s engaged, isn’t quite as interesting, but he supports the novel’s main mission: chronicling Alicia’s struggle to sort out who she is and what she wants, with her new friend La Garza as both role model and cautionary tale. Brilliant party scenes, tart dialogue, and dramatic plot developments further enrich this gripping work, another step forward for the talented Gonzalez.
Smart, tough-minded, and passionate: a pleasure from start to finish.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781250372031
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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