An engaging tale that provides a fresh look at the importance of second chances.
Following her father’s mysterious death, a young woman returns to her childhood home, unexpectedly reuniting with her first great love and uncovering lingering family secrets.
As Lucy Cooper delivers the eulogy at her father’s funeral on Winthrop Island, a Northeast vacation spot where her dad lived year-round, she can’t believe he’s gone. It’s been years since she’s seen him, both because of her relocation to Europe and her dad’s embarrassing obsession with chasing pirate treasure. Lucy is surprised to discover that her long-ago crush, Ben Ressler, has returned to the island to nurse his own wounds. A disgraced NFL player, Ben recently made a tackle that caused another player’s death; the fallout ended both his career and his marriage. While Lucy and Ben try to grieve their losses, they find themselves drawn to each other again. Meanwhile someone is targeting Lucy, breaking into her father’s house and intentionally unsettling her for reasons she can’t glean. As she searches for answers, the narrative shifts to two other timelines: First, flashbacks to Lucy and Ben’s high school courtship in 2012; and 1717, when a young woman named Hephzibah met the pirate Ramsay. As the stories progress in tandem, it becomes clear that Lucy’s father’s treasure hunt may not have been so crazy after all, and that Lucy and Ben might still find happiness together. The chapters alternate among characters, portraying Lucy in first person, with Ben and Hephzibah’s chapters in a more distant third. The portions focused on Lucy and Ben are instantly engaging, while Hephzibah’s story gets off to a much slower start, the temporal and tonal shifts feeling abrupt and out of sync with the tenor of the more modern tale. Readers may be tempted to skim in order to get back to Lucy or Ben, but the plotlines gradually interconnect, rendering the 1717 tale more absorbing as it progresses. A particular strength of the book is the setting of Winthrop Island, atmospheric in its isolation, with uncontrolled natural elements and community elements enriching the story. Similarly, as Lucy and Hephzibah each battle villains, the author eventually brings the suspense to a breathtaking crescendo that makes the entire book worthwhile.
An engaging tale that provides a fresh look at the importance of second chances.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9798217094820
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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