A vivid and often touching novel of the fragility of family bonds.
Secrets, lies, and failing crops are tearing a family, and their farm, apart in Blevens’ historical novel.
It’s 1927 in Benton County, Arkansas, and 30-year-old Jesse Fitch lives on his family farm with his 27-year-old wife, Marybeth, and their son Levi, who’s 7. His twin brother, Silas, is also there, as are Silas’ wife and daughters, and the siblings’ father, known as “Paps.” The land has been in their family for several generations, but it’s not producing like it used to do. A late frost, too much rain, and continued pest infestations have kept the trees from growing fruit, which means no money’s coming in for the family. Jesse is sure that the answer is to give up the farm and head west, but Silas and Paps are dead set against the idea, believing that the trees will fruit again next year. Jesse, however, knows the score: The Fitches owe more to the bank than the land is worth, but Silas swears everything will be fine. However, as determined as Silas is to stay on the land, he knows they need cash to stave off eviction, so he starts working with some locals that need an out-of-the-way farm to hide and smuggle illegal liquor. Jesse wants nothing to do with this arrangement, but Silas is willing to lie, cheat, or worse if it means staying on the land. Over the course of this historical novel, Blevens presents a compelling tale of hardship. Although the brothers are twins, they effectively act as foils to each other, and as they go about protecting their families in different ways, they manage to work with and against each other, by turns. There are vivid descriptions of the land (“He passed a cottonwood trunk, three feet in diameter with furrowed gray-brown bark, leaning over the river where the erosive wandering of the channel had robbed the tree of its tenuous clutch on the sandy bank”) and the Fitches’ hardships, making this work a journey into the past that readers can inhabit, and they’ll feel the family’s pain and loss as they experience it.
A vivid and often touching novel of the fragility of family bonds.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798999079404
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Lost Meridian Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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