Geni’s ambivalent novel takes pop culture’s fascination with hit men and serial killers to a disturbing new level.
A Michigan beekeeper re-examines the legacy of her monstrous yet weirdly endearing father, who raised her to believe in Viking mythology as a guiding, all-encompassing religion.
In the novel’s first pages, 34-year-old narrator Liv Thorvaldsson announces that a murder was committed one month ago, but solving the mystery must wait because first she wants to explain, in beautifully crafted but heart-stopping scenes, her secret childhood. Liv and her older brother, Finn, were raised in rural Iowa by their tyrannical but occasionally “whimsical” single father, Ulf Thorvaldsson. Swedish-born Ulf kept his children on his isolated property, protected from contemporary America by thick barbed wire, and declared the family a “Viking clan of three.” He was so skilled at drilling her in Norse mythology and its value of warfare that the gods of the Norse Edda remain real to adult, worldly Liv. Ulf considered himself a Viking warrior for whom loyalty to the tribe was the highest virtue and killing an honorable, even pleasurable pursuit. Consequently, his career as a murderer—the overlap between hit man and serial killer is never clarified—makes unnerving sense. So does his gruesome act of Viking punishment: cutting off Finn’s tongue for turning him in to the FBI. With Ulf in prison for life, Liv’s narration circles back to her current life. She and Finn have grown up and assimilated into the modern world and now raise bees together. (Geni includes detailed information on bees as well as Norse legends.) Liv falls in love with Penny Westerman, whose cozy rural cottage and work aiding victims of domestic violence seem healthy inversions of Liv’s childhood with Ulf. But when the dead body shows up and revelations accumulate, Liv must reconsider her deepest values. Whether the author considers Liv’s decision to inspire hope or despair is uncertain.
Geni’s ambivalent novel takes pop culture’s fascination with hit men and serial killers to a disturbing new level.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798217299539
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
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
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