A skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule.
Iranian writer Mandanipour delivers a series of stories that are alternately spectral and somber but altogether subversive.
In the opening story, "Shadows of the Cave," a widower quietly defies the new Iranian theocracy by wearing a dark suit and tie, “which since the revolution has been considered ‘the leash of civilization’ and is unofficially banned,” in order to visit his wife’s grave in a cemetery now crowded with victims of the mullahs. He defies the censorial dictates of the regime as well, keeping a large private library, nursing memories of a long-ago post before the shah’s coup d’état of 1953. The library—and this is the crux—focuses on animals, with which Mr. Farvaneh has a philosophical obsession: “At times,” he intones, “their indifference to humans is truly insulting.” In the title story, Iran’s war with Iraq provides a scenario in which endless suffering breeds just that indifference to other humans, as a wounded Iraqi in no-man’s land eventually disintegrates against an exposed hillside. Remarks the Iranian narrator, “One day, we noticed that his lips had decomposed—it was the worms’ doing—his long teeth were exposed; he looked like he was laughing. Late one night, an animal ripped off his arm and took it away, but he didn’t fall.” Nasser, the doomed Iraqi soldier, is a drag on morale on both sides, but there’s nothing anyone can do until finally an officer, driven nearly mad by combat, erases his presence with a rocket. In "Seven Captains," speaking to current headlines, another soldier gloomily remarks of the power plant he’s guarding, “There’s talk that the Westerners have said they’ll bomb it. If they do, people say we’ll all die….Do you think they’re right?” Death comes in many forms in stories marked by symbolic animals: fish, worms, cuckoos, cowering dogs, snakes that hide among “the arabesque motif on the carpet,” everywhere they can trouble the dreams of struggling humans.
A skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-942658-95-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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