A strong, vivid batch of tales about ordinary folks living Biloxi lives.
A collection of short stories focused on Biloxi, Mississippi.
In this anthology of 11 tales ranging from 5 to 15 pages each, Franz explores the lives of ordinary people who reside in and around Biloxi. They struggle with personal weaknesses, unresolved tragedies, and the persistent sense of longing that comes from the fact that Biloxi is home to the world’s “longest man-made beach,” with all that this implies about a greater, more natural world somewhere beyond the town limits. In “Tchoutacabouffa (Life on a River),” for instance, a woman named Ashley Rose Jackson has tensely and carefully planned an escape for herself and her two daughters from their abusive father. She promises them that their new life will be better. “We’re going to a real ocean,” she tells them. “They’ve got a boardwalk and everything.” Likewise, in “A Good Home,” set during the Covid-19 pandemic, Emily and Ryan live in a shabby two-bedroom house off Interstate 10. Ryan’s a recovering addict in a methadone treatment program, and he’s floored when Emily tells him she’s pregnant. As they make their grim plans, Emily recalls an old dream: “The panes trembled in their white wooden grid from a big rig out on I-10, which she’d heard could take you all the way to the Pacific Ocean. To cold, clean water, a real ocean, a real beach.” All of these stories are markedly, sometimes startlingly spare, which underscores Franz’s deft ability to convey whole lives and worlds with minimal, very controlled brushstrokes. In “Broadwater,” the older brother of a young man named Tyler, who vanished 11 years ago, spends the whole story reflecting on the events that led to his brother’s murder, now a cold case. (“Hard to believe,” he thinks at one point, “my little brother would be thirty years old today.”) Rather than providing readers with an expected sense of closure, Franz ends the tale with the brother reflecting, “My best guess, life’s a one-shot deal. Gone is gone.” This clipped, almost brutal tone runs throughout most of these stories and makes them truly memorable.
A strong, vivid batch of tales about ordinary folks living Biloxi lives.Pub Date: March 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Watertower Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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