An endearingly offbeat story with particularly timely themes.
A Malaysian immigrant in New York embarks on a journey of self-discovery after her husband walks out on her.
Edwina comes home one day from her exhausting job at a New York tech company and finds that her husband, Marlin, has gone missing. He’s been acting strangely for months now, ever since his father died, talking about “spirit guides” and wielding a crystal pendant. Edwina just wants her old Marlin back, the logical engineer who complemented the liberal arts major in her perfectly. When she eventually does track him down—he’s crashing at a friend’s place in Queens—he refuses to even look at her, much less talk to her. To make matters worse, things at work are going poorly: She’s the quality assurance analyst—and the only woman—at a startup called AInstein, which is creating a joke-telling robot. When she informs the oblivious or downright boorish software engineers that their robot’s jokes are sexist, she’s told to focus on her own job. But time is running out on her and Marlin’s work visas; they need their employers to sponsor their green cards or they’ll have to return to Malaysia or become undocumented. And Edwina is trying to hide everything from her mother, a judgmental woman who constantly criticizes her for being fat. Amid all this, Edwina reconsiders everything she thought she knew: her identity, her relationships, and her feelings about her adopted country. Chin’s novel is littered with genuinely funny moments; Edwina’s voice is a chatty, engaging one that belies her depth. “It wasn’t the first time I’d hoped for psychic transformation and ended with diarrhea,” she cracks after eating far too many Chicken McNuggets in an attempt to understand Marlin’s drastic change (he’s vegan, she’s vegetarian). The novel also presents a layered view of racism: Marlin is detained at a New York airport for his dark skin (he’s half Chinese, half Indian), while Edwina has a run-in with racist cops but gets away without injury. Malaysian culture, though, has its own “atmosphere of…poisons”: “In Malaysia I was supposed to go back to China. In America I was supposed to return to Malaysia. Was this progress? If I moved to China, would they tell me to piss off to America, thus resulting in some sort of infinite loop?”
An endearingly offbeat story with particularly timely themes.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-303068-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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
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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