A queer, eerie debut.
A young woman tries to survive supernatural happenings at her boarding school.
Something wicked this way comes in Curran’s Sapphic gothic debut. Set at Briarley School for Girls in 1928, the novel follows strong-minded Emily Locke as she navigates a school year she will never forget. Near the start of term, Violet Kirsch, the “golden girl” of their class, dies unexpectedly on her 18th birthday. Emily and her nemesis, Evelyn Hart, whose lives revolved around Violet, are shattered by her death. Violet’s death seems to set off—or perhaps unearths—something evil onto the school. Spoiled food, sludgy water, unexplained illness, and strange behavior begin to plague the ladies of Briarley. As the bodies pile up, the girls turn reluctantly to spiritualism as a way to solve the deadly mystery. While other students leave, Emily and her remaining classmates close in to protect each other and their home: “I’d grown accustomed to the six of us existing as a unit, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it being broken apart.” With Evelyn as their chosen but discontented medium, the girls reach into the beyond—and are devastated by what they find. As Emily and Evelyn step toward the unsaid truth at the center of their relationship with Violet, they begin to see their late friend—and each other—more clearly than ever. Queerness weaves through the novel like an inversion of the rot spreading through the school. Though the book is steeped in the realities of the time period, Curran wonderfully shows how the girl’s burgeoning sexuality and relationships provide them with a complicated refuge from the dangers within and beyond Briarley. The use of foreshadowing effectively builds tension and dread—but the novel also hits similar beats over and over, which affects the pacing. Regardless, the novel’s true strength is exploring the complex relationships among the girls—both living and dead—and the unknowns of the world.
A queer, eerie debut.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780385551595
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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