A debut novel that dishes up one of the most delectable ingredients of all: fun.
An unemployed food writer agrees to ghostwrite a cookbook for an erratic starlet looking to revive her career and reputation.
“Dowdy” Isabella Pasternak is on the bottom rung of the career ladder, writing about things like chickpea trends and cheese options for Comestibles magazine. After unexpectedly stepping in to do an Instagram Live on chocolate soufflés that ends in disaster, she is unceremoniously fired. The same day, after rescuing her best friend, Owen, from a caviar catastrophe at his wealthy father’s birthday party, Isabella is rewarded with an opportunity via Owen’s dad: Ghostwrite a cookbook for one of his clients. Isabella initially balks; cookbooks are sacred to her, and she wants to be more than a mere ghostwriter. But the alternative—help her mother make “her signature Frankensoups” for soup kitchen patrons—is too anguishing. The client in question, Molly Babcock, isn’t about to make things easy. She’s everything Isabella expects from a disgraced actress who’s been in the tabloids more than on set. Molly is self-absorbed, vain, and often drunk—plus apparently uninterested in actually eating any food. But when Molly unexpectedly lets Isabella in on a key part of her past, the women’s professional and personal relationship grows suddenly more complicated, forcing Isabella to confront the kind of career she really wants, and the person she really wants to be. Roberts’ novel is a confection—satisfyingly over-the-top—but with complex notes; he has a true knack for understanding the ways that food rules every aspect of our lives, from the gourmet’s obsession to the shame and guilt surrounding indulgence. But even readers who don’t know a branzino from bearnaise will find plenty to enjoy here, from the colorful secondary characters to the zippy plot.
A debut novel that dishes up one of the most delectable ingredients of all: fun.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803837
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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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