A rich, engrossing tale that manages to be both concise and expansive.
A sexually charged graphic novel tracing a woman’s desperate attempts to ascend beyond the strict confines of 16th-century Dutch society.
Amélie comes from a noble family that has fallen on hard times, which is how she came to be in a miserable marriage to simple merchant Hans. While her frugal and pragmatic husband spends most of his time in his library or at his raucous merchant’s guild, Amélie grudgingly tends to the domestic chores expected of her—including the servicing of Hans’ carnal needs. Privately, she indulges her obsession with the mechanics of flight by studying the skeletons of flying creatures (an interest Hans equates to witchcraft). Amélie longs to escape the world of men, and she gets a taste when Hans sails for Lisbon on business. Amélie spends months unmolested and creates a simple flying machine. But both the machine and her freedom crash back to earth when Hans eventually returns—with a mistress in tow. “Sahara” is an enslaved Asian woman Hans claims to have saved from a fate as a “mere harlot,” though the reality proves more selfish and savage. As everything the devout and reserved Amélie is not—passionate, hedonistic, self-assured, and satisfied—Sahara initially receives Amélie’s resentment. But Amélie finds her thoughts drifting to Sahara’s voluptuous body and unguarded manner. The two gradually learn from each other and achieve a breakthrough in Amélie’s quest for flight. But the increasingly destitute Hans co-opts their flying machine for his business interests, and the hubris of men threatens to finally suffocate Amélie. Yudori’s tale is as captivating as it is titillating, with her illustrations elegantly depicting everything from complex emotions to the erotic contours of the female form. The plot and characters are engagingly complex, and the pacing deliciously brisk.
A rich, engrossing tale that manages to be both concise and expansive.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798875001062
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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