A lively and beguiling tale that depicts a world no one should wish to live in.
An elusive, centrifugal story of a grim near future that might stop George Orwell in his tracks.
Breton, who shares a name with the noted surrealist, is schizophrenic, locked away in a psych ward but with the uncanny ability to see distant events out on the edge of a city that might as well be the East Berlin of old—or a dark, rainy version of a Tibetan bardo. The city is ruled by the Party, which would seem to be in steep decline, even if the downtrodden proles won’t admit that awful truth: “It’ll last till the bitter end,” says one old woman. (Even the young in French author Volodine’s tale are preternaturally aged.) “We’ll all be dead and buried to a man and the Party will still be there.” So, too, will Monroe, a member of the inner circle executed years earlier but somehow returned to life, as are the girls of the title, fierce fighters with names like Lilia Adouldjamani, Mirka Goldenberg, and Mariana Magadane—and the love of Breton’s life, Rebecca Rausch, who died 30 years earlier and yet stalks the streets, armed to the teeth. The chief difference between the living and the dead is that the dead swear more, and Rebecca in particular hurls F-bombs like grenades (“Fuck!…I was just born, the night is young, and already my feet are frozen!”). Alive or dead, Rebecca makes for a fine revolutionary, demanding that the masses “approve a new direction for the Party, now restructured under Monroe’s leadership, and to finish the great cleansing of the cowards, bureaucrats, opportunists, and traitors by hunting them down in their dens or by exposing them if they were disguised as hospital workers, hybrid creatures, or patients.” Alas, things don’t work out quite to plan, especially when Monroe himself returns to add more mayhem to an already chaotic narrative.
A lively and beguiling tale that depicts a world no one should wish to live in.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781962770552
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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