A patiently detailed and heartfelt book about a challenged family and forgiveness.
In Wueste’s novel, a man’s family struggles to accept him when he’s released after nearly 20 years in prison.
Matt Keegan, an upper-middle-class white kid, does a very stupid thing in high school: He becomes a drug dealer, and a very naïve fellow student overdoses on his product. Matt doesn’t help himself by playing it ultra cool and remorseless at his trial. After 20 years in a Maryland prison, he’s released on parole; his younger sister, Jenny Arvizu, is determined that he make it in the outside world, so she takes him in to the home she shares with her husband, Hector, and their daughter, Julia. Hector runs a cafe that already employs ex-cons, so Matt has a job waiting for him. Jenny is well meaning but can be too much of a mother hen, and her parents are deeply angry, even after all the years of their son’s incarceration. Matt’s dad, Ted, is not only sure that Matt is going to mess up again, but also hopes he will, wanting Matt back out of their lives; Matt’s mother, Helene, is even more rigidly furious. She tells Jenny that she “‘won’t be coming to visit as long as he,’ the reference to her oldest child always spit from her mouth like venom, ‘is staying there.’” Complicating things even further is Kenneth Hoskins, the father of the girl who died. He stalks Matt, determined to provoke the kind of confrontation that will send him back to prison. The stakes are clear in Wueste’s compelling narrative: The Keegans have lived in a world of pain but have to learn forgiveness; Matt has to really understand how many people he has hurt and just how badly he has hurt them. Readers learn in the acknowledgments how much research went into this book about a very important topic, which, by its nature, offers deep human lessons. Readers may be reminded of Anne Tyler’s work, and not just because this story is set in Maryland; Wueste, who’s won justified praise for her previous novels, is that good.
A patiently detailed and heartfelt book about a challenged family and forgiveness.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781967077113
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Fox Island Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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