A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.
A young Japanese girl spends the pastoral summer of 1972 with her asthmatic cousin.
Focusing on characters of an age when the world seems full of wonder and possibility, this engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people. Our narrator is 12-year-old Tomoko, who has been sent to live with her aunt’s family in the wake of her father’s death as her mother studies dressmaking in Tokyo. In comparison to their young charge, the family is outsized—sophisticated and wealthy inheritors of a soft-drink empire, complete with a country estate—and includes Tomoko’s enigmatic aunt; her half-German uncle, who is more absent than not; and their charismatic 18-year-old son, Ryūichi, off studying at university. The center of Tomoko’s orbit is her younger cousin, Mina, an ailing bookworm who persuades Tomoko to raid the local library for her fix and eventually shares the secret of her hidden collection of matchboxes, given to her by a crush. This curious duo is lightly grounded by the inclusion of groundskeeper Kobayashi and cook Yoneda, who has curiously bonded late in life to Mina’s German grandmother, Rosa. If this weren’t enough to fill a Wes Anderson film’s worth of oddballs, there’s always Mina’s pet pygmy hippopotamus, Pochiko, the last survivor of a family zoo closed since World War II. While much of what we see on the surface is idyllic, Ogawa laces her narrative with real-life tragedies, among them the mysterious suicide of Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language, she pulls off a neat trick here, painting everything in miniature and often in hindsight without losing the immediacy of Tomoko’s experiences.
A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593316085
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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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