The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

"I am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane" - wrote fictional Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a retired attorney, in a letter to the real life Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry. Couldn't we all say that latter part about our lives - that they are a mix of mundanity and the profoundly unexpected? 

I waited several months to get my turn with this novel after putting in a request at the library in the early Fall; it's been that much in demand since its April 2025 publication. The Correspondent has been called the sleeper hit of 2025.

The novel is structured as a series of letters and emails between protagonist Sybil and a number of people in her personal orbit, as well as a few well known authors she did not know personally including McMurtry and Joan Didion. In the first three quarters of the book there doesn't seem to be much that is remarkable about this woman's life: Though it has its difficulties and profound sorrows, it is also a fortunate and rather insulated life.  

Sybil has always loved to write and receive letters. In retirement this inclination sharpens as she begins to devote several mornings a week to correspondence with a number of people. Curiously though, many of her letters ramble on and on with way too much information. The woman should have kept a diary to record some of this stuff rather than pour it so narcissistically into letters. The purpose of this unfiltered tedium of course is to establish who Sybil is, as well as to further the novel's trajectory. Still, I read with skepticism; she seems to lay bare her soul unnecessarily in so many of her letters, as do most of the people who write back to her. She even does this in emails exchanged with a customer service rep, crossing boundaries that eventually get the employee fired. So many of her letters to peripheral acquaintances are full of irrelevant detail. For a letter writer as practiced as Sybil is, this seems odd. Who really does that with everyone they know, whether close or not? 

On the other hand the intimate confidences exchanged with her lifelong friend Rosalie who lives in another city are genuine and beautifully expressed, as are letters to and from her brother. I love that she and Rosalie end every letter with "I'm reading [ _________.] What are you reading?"  

A lot of people love Sybil. But she isn't likeable. Her daughter doesn't even like her. She comes across as entitled, closed-minded, defensive, thoughtless, pushy - a regular Karen, to use a pejorative label from the current vernacular. When she meets an obstacle, rather than considering others' positions or points of view, she just keeps pushing to get her way. Yet she always does the "correct" thing when a social situation calls for it. She has superficially good manners, but thoughtfulness, sympathy, and empathy are not Sybil's first instincts. I didn't like this woman, yet after a few pages the book started to embed hooks in me such that I looked forward to returning to it each time I had to put it down. 

Given these complaints, what hooked me once I'd begun this book? Beautiful prose, for one thing - even in inappropriately rambling letters. And: other people's stories that unfold in ongoing correspondence. Sybil's correspondence is a conduit to some emotionally haunting human interest stories. The Correspondent felt at times like a de facto collection of riveting short stories parsed out bit by bit in the letters Sybil received. These stories-within-a-story kept me plugged in throughout.

Yet toward the end of the book, at last I found Sybil's own story satisfying. In the last decade of her life she begins to soften and open herself up less narcissistically and more genuinely. She becomes likeable - but only after being confronted in various ways with her own rigid, reflexive thoughtlessness and made to see the sometimes devastating effects on others of her decisions and behaviors. Her transition is evident in her writing. After she begins to let down her guard, life gets bigger and very interesting, presenting her with the above referenced miracles.   

I suspect each reader won over by The Correspondent connects a bit of their own experience to the emotionally resonant universal themes woven into it. Altogether a satisfying novel worth the wait.

-Marianne W. 

More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey

In More Weight, artist and writer Ben Wickey tells a story of the terrible year of 1692, where neighbors suddenly turned on each other and innocent people were killed by the state simply because they were convicted of witchcraft. Shifting through time, we follow the Salem Witch Trials through the eyes of Giles Corey, and, to a lesser extent, his wife Martha. In spring of 1692, Giles attends one of the first trials and is taken in by the claims of the young women, swayed by their actions, and basically gets swept up into the whole thing. When Martha dismisses the whole thing as lies and superstition, Giles begins to wonder if she could be a witch, and ultimately brings an accusation of witchcraft against her to those leading the trials, who then arrest her. But Giles himself isn't exempt from the hysteria, and is eventually accused and arrested himself. Interwoven into the story of the Coreys are interludes set not quite 200 years later, as Nathanial Hawthorne escorts Henry Wadsworth Longfellow through Salem. Hawthorne, a native of Salem, had his own connections to the trials through an ancestor, John Hathorne, who was one of the judges. The two writers discuss Salem, the state of post-Civil War America, their writing, and their own losses as they wander the city under the guise of Hawthorne helping Longfellow in researching the trials for a play in verse on Giles Corey that Longfellow is writing. Bracketing the whole thing is Wickey's musings about modern-day Salem as the city gradually fills with tourists ready to celebrate Halloween in a place synonymous with witches and all things spooky, before diving deep through the post-witch trial history of Salem, Massachusetts, and the United States as a whole.

This is the kind of graphic novel that really showcases the versatility of the comics format, and the pure artistry that goes into telling stories in this way. Wickey gives each time period of the story its own art style and set of colors, making it easy to distinguish which part of the story you're getting next. The trials are done in black and white, with the figures more simply drawn, reminiscent of linocut printing. Hawthorne and Longfellow's story includes color, though everything is a little muddy, like an old postcard, and the characters look more like the engravings that would have been done for newspapers and magazines of that time period. The modern day parts are clearly more in line with Wickey's personal style of drawing, and feature saturated, almost jewel-toned colors.

What really drew me in was the story and the depth of research that went into it. Many of us have probably learned something about the Salem Witch Trials in history class, but how many of us can actually say that we understand the full history of the Salem Witch Trials? I know I didn't know much beyond the basics: young girls began acting strangely, accusing others, mainly women, of witchcraft, and many of those accused were convicted and killed. The fuller story is, of course, much more nuanced than that, and Wickey goes to great lengths to include all of that historical detail, using primary sources, information from experts, and much more to craft this story. This is very evident in the portion of the book near the end where he moves the story away from 1692 and lays out everything that happened afterwards. Instead of just focusing on certain details as they relate to the trials, or only giving a partial timeline, he crafts a comprehensive history that moves through 300+ years to bring us to the present day. There is some editorializing - part of that comprehensive history does critique how not much effort was made to stop people from linking witches to Salem and using it for tourism, and he also dismisses some of the theories that have been proposed to explain why the accusers acted the way they did. But I think what really struck me is the subtle argument he makes as he lays out this post-witch trial history, which is that when we don't fully examine our actions, when we don't take steps to understand what happened and why it happened, it leaves space for people to paper over things, forget who was harmed, and allow misinformation in. Wickey makes it clear that once the trials were over and everyone involved began to realize what they had just done, limited efforts were made to apologize and correct the injustice that was done. In fact, it wasn't until 2022 that the last victim was formally exonerated.

This was one of my favorite books that I read in 2025, and I highly recommend it. If you're looking for books to read that tie into America 250, or are into history in general, definitely pick this one up.

Take a Breath, Big Red Monster! By Ed Emberley

A fun companion book to the bestselling classic Go Away, Big Green Monster shows kids how to calm down with more than ten interactive peek-a-boo pages.  Strategies include taking deep breaths, closing your eyes and imagining a cooling rain.  With very colorful pages, kids preschool through school age will love this book and may ask you to read it over and over again.

-Julie B.

Winter Storm Reads: Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney & Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Since the winter storm is keeping us indoors another day, I thought I'd share two books about snow I've read this month. 

Published a year ago this week, Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney is about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks being terrorized by a swirling mass of snow. Really! 

The story alternates between Brian and Holly present and Brian and Holly a year ago before a traumatic, bloody event that left them both, separately and together, changed. In the present narrative, they take a spontaneous vacation to a ski village but are derailed en route by a snow storm that has the power to yank someone out through a car window.  

We also get chapters from the village sheriff's perspective. Up until recently, Kendra felt confident and content, but then her girlfriend left her, two tourists went missing, and now she feels like a failure, stranded in an interior blizzard. 

Kendra, Brian, and Holly will encounter an unexplainable phenomenon before the night is through. 

This is an enjoyable, non-literary, old-fashioned horror story: It is a fun read that is also about the ways we avoid dealing with traumatic events; it isn't a book about TRAUMA dressed in the loose-fitting garb of a "horror" story. It's well-written but not in a way that distracts from the plot. It's got a sizeable cast of characters and they don't all make it, but at the heart of it is Brian and Holly: Will they survive, and if so, will their relationship make it? 

And now for something completely different! The other wintery book I read was Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker. Originally published in three parts over the course of ten years, the final version emerged as a whole in 1947. Snow Country is a melancholy winter poem in short novel form, frank and unromantic. 

"Snow country" refers to the mountainous region on the western coast of Japan known for its heavy snowfall, where pleasure-seekers go to ski, enjoy the hot springs, drink sake, and enjoy the company of geishas. Over the course of three visits to a hot spring resort in a remote mountain village, a married Tokyo idler (Shimamura) becomes intimate with a young geisha, Komako. There is no pretense that theirs will be a lasting love affair. Hot spring geishas aren't known for being particularly well-trained in music, dance, or song. 

The writing is absorbing, occasionally transcendently beautiful, lovely and sad. So much reflection on "wasted effort:" beauty and talent existing in a snowbound, uncultured village. When Shimamura is with Komako, he is reminded of his own futile enjoyments (hiking mountains; an intended self-published book on ballet, an art he's never seen nor wants to). In snow country, it is clear that time just passes, with nothing to show for us having been there but perhaps a series of diaries read over only by their writer, or a fine cotton cloth that will long outlive its anonymous creator. 

I hope everyone is safe and warm, cozy with their pets or other loved ones. 

-Michael G. 

Frills and Thrills by Louise Barnes Gallagher

Sometimes, there are treasures to be found on the free books cart at the entrance to the Ferguson Public Library.

One such treasure was a vintage book called Frills and Thrills by Louise Barnes Gallagher. It's the story of a young woman who matures from creating doll clothes as a child to designing and sewing her own much-admired clothes for college life, modeling at fashion shows, and eventually creating elegant designs for a high fashion couture house. This charming book, published in 1940, is based on the real-life experience of its author.

Not only did Louise Barnes Gallagher in reality design sought-after clothes from the 1920s through the end of the '40s, she also wrote good stories that followed her own personal trajectory while changing enough of it to create characters with interesting dilemmas and developments in the context of compelling historical fiction.  

In Frills and Thrills, we tag along with young Mary Bray beginning in her college years and moving into professional life as she grows in sewing and design skill as well as confidence and competence. We learn how the world of women's fashion design, production, and promotion operates. The story of Mary's professional development is fleshed out by her personal life, which has its share of ups, downs, disappointments, personal sorrows and joys, while unexpected opportunities and influential mentors help her establish professional footing. She's an earnest young woman who - despite hardships in early adulthood - seems to live a charmed life, the latter aspect giving the book much of its compelling readability. A few period-type illustrations add to the appeal of this book.   

More than merely an enjoyable reading experience though, I discovered this book is part of a series of "career books" written as novels for teenage girls and young women. The collection was published by Dodd, Mead and Company between the 1930s and '60s.   

I was hooked enough by the story of this young designer to search and find what I could about this author and this series of books. That led to a few surprises, though it was unsurprising to learn that the series was created to expose girls and young women to the day-to-day activities of a variety of occupations and professions. There are the expected ones for the time period during which they were produced: nursing, teaching, nutrition, home economy, social work and library work, for instance. There were also novels to introduce readers to fields a girl might not have considered, such as police work, X-ray technician, radio interviewer, physician, "sky librarian," "mountain nurse," "sky nurse" - and many more.

I found myself wishing I had known of these books when I was in high school, as by the early 1970s there were few obvious professional role models for girls in my middle class world, following a nationwide cultural campaign waged after World War II that persisted into the 1960s, designed initially to push women out of jobs and to generally discourage professional aspirations by emphasizing the primary importance for women of family creation and homemaking. Men returning from that war needed their jobs back, after all. This campaign - waged in newspapers and national magazines - set the women's movement back significantly during the mid-20th century. It was aimed at my mother's generation and was largely successful, at least for middle- and upper-class women, leaving their daughters with a limited view of occupational possibilities. Our role models then were teachers, nurses and secretaries. These jobs were typically thought of as ones to occupy only until starting a family. That was the era when child rearing, homemaking and personal beauty enhancement were the chief focus of women's magazines. In Catholic communities there was another female role model of course: nun. 

Yet somehow - concurrently - these richly instructive counterculture books got written and published...and then went out of fashion. 

I found another surprise in my search for more of these vintage titles: they are nearly impossible to find! The Library of Congress has them, as do a number of university libraries. But I could not find them in our library catalogue, and they are scarce in the used book market, and pricey! Searching from a long list of titles in this series, I found very few available among several used book websites including ThriftBooks, Better World Books, AbeBooks, eBay, and Amazon. Ginger Lee, War Nurse by Dorothy Deming for example, is offered on one bookseller's site for $125. Another title in the series was listed for $200. Many of the titles I couldn't find for sale anywhere. Apparently they have become coveted collectors' items that quickly get snatched up.

Finally, in Frills and Thrills I learned a fun fact about my home town that surprised me: St Louis was once an important player in the world of fashion. During the earlier part of the last century the nation's most successful clothing designers gathered regularly at our city's upscale hotels to show the new seasonal styles to buyers from America's major department stores. Chapter 15 of this book is titled St. Louis Preview; it's where the story's protagonist makes some significant career progress.  

Louise Barnes Gallagher wrote two sequels to Frills and Thrills. I looked - in vain - for them in library catalogs and on used booksellers' websites. I would like to read more about fictional Mary Bray and where her charmed life took her. My fruitless search told me I'm not the only one who loved this book and keeps it in their book collection. 

- Marianne W.