A heartfelt, if sometimes-overwritten, story of a first love’s lasting impact.
Two teenagers in a mental health ward fall in love in Grey’s lyrical and introspective novel.
Elizabeth “Zibby” Holloway is at the start of a six-week stay in rehab for her eating disorder. In the program, she meets Nico Hawthorne, a 17-year-old boy suffering from depression and anxiety. Throughout their daily schedules of jigsaw puzzles, mealtimes, and tending a basil plant they’ve named Atlas, the teens form a quiet, almost wordless bond. As they progress through healing and relapses before their eventual release, Zibby and Nico provide support, purpose, and inspiration to each other. This is tale of first love that exists in a liminal space, and Zibby and Nico’s story acts as a quiet reminder of how a single relationship can affect someone for the rest of their lives—even if they only knew them for six weeks in a hospital ward. Grey deftly captures the thought processes of her characters, with a keen focus on the monotonous day-to-day schedule and landscape of the ward: “The room feels less like a room and more like a waiting space between worlds.” The prose is frequently evocative, although it sometimes lingers on description at the expense of plot progression. The titular cartography theme is quickly established in an intriguing way and followed throughout. There is a feeling of repetitiveness, however. Every chapter seems to open with a flowery description—of a nurse’s desk, for instance, or the bean bags in group therapy—and conclude with a small epiphany. It’s a device that’s powerful at first, but unfortunately overused. It also occurs at the expense of developing Zibby and Nico’s relationship, which is built so much on unspoken moments that it feels nearly unrealized. That said, Grey delivers an emotional story and handles the heavy subject matter with grace.
A heartfelt, if sometimes-overwritten, story of a first love’s lasting impact.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781961841444
Page Count: 242
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 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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