A highly readable story of ties that bind and skeletons in the closet.
In Blumenfeld’s novel, a teacher deals with her childhood best friend’s impending release from prison.
April Nelson is a Brooklyn, New York, native who’s built a solid life for herself in Chicago. She’s an elementary school teacher who’s married to Peter, a lawyer who’s running for state’s attorney, and with three young kids to raise and aging parents back in New York, she has a busy life. However, elements of her past return to haunt her. In college, she and her childhood friend and neighbor, Rudy DeFranco, went to a bar, where an altercation ensued in which Rudy pulled a knife; after a struggle, the knife fell to the ground, April grabbed it, and she and Rudy fled the scene before fully taking in what happened. The other party died the next day, and Rudy ended up in prison; April was later expelled from college. Now, Rudy is being released from prison. April is already getting calls from the media, and she hopes to prevent any damage to Peter’s political aspirations, and to her other family members’ lives. Specifically, Jillian Jones, a journalist who went to college with April, has learned of the new developments; she covered the crime for their college newspaper years ago. Now a newspaper reporter in Manhattan, she knows that it could be a big story. Blumenfeld’s follow up to 2018’s The Cast features a clearheaded and ambitious protagonist who essentially carries the novel. The author effectively describes April’s history as a New Yorker, as well as her current circumstances and fraught emotions, in a way that feel realistic and relatable. Her history is complicated, as Jillian discovers, and April’s feelings about Rudy are, too, but the narrative relates it all clearly; however, readers may feel that the characterization of April’s politically ambitious husband is left on the back burner for too long. Overall, though, this engaging novel succeeds as a story of dealing with the consequences and challenges of decisions made in one’s youth.
A highly readable story of ties that bind and skeletons in the closet.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781684633227
Page Count: 360
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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