A delayed coming-of-age story that’s both perceptive and absorbing.
Six friends travel to Hawaii to celebrate their 30th birthdays and, after dodging imminent death, spend their time together drinking, bickering, reaching for one another, and investigating their years of interconnection.
Clare, Kyle, Renzo, Mac, Jessie, and Liam have known one another since seventh grade in L.A. They’ve fallen in and out of friendship and love with one another and have emerged as a (sometimes begrudgingly) inseparable unit. On this particular reunion in January 2018, they’ve gathered in Kyle’s parents’ second home on the island of Kaua‘i, planning to spend the week in full-on vacation mode. Then comes an emergency text advisory: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawai‘i…This is not a drill.” After a few pages of watching the characters panic, we learn that the message was human error. The group feels its aftershocks long after that morning, though, and the anxiety it sows feeds the interpersonal reckonings that follow. Much of the richness in this novel is found in the conversations among the friends, which extend from their shared history and personal lives to politics, race, and class. Hawaii is a fitting backdrop for the more political conversations, but the relationship between the group and the land is not as fully fleshed-out as the friends’ grudges and crushes. The main protagonist, Clare, spends much of the book reminiscing on years past and chewing over her writing career, marriage to her college sweetheart, and relationship with each member of the group. Baker beautifully expresses the pressures of growing older while not feeling older, as well as the comfort of being with people who knew you as an adolescent—when you were unformed and naive, as you might still feel from time to time. “When you’ve known people this long,” Clare thinks, “when you knew them in middle school, knew their mothers and their childhood bedrooms, you can always see the ghosts at their shoulders.”
A delayed coming-of-age story that’s both perceptive and absorbing.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781250345776
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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
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