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.