An evocative, kaleidoscopic affirmation of life from the perspective of Death.
The personification of death stumbles on companionship in the small British city where he lives, as he continues standing sentinel beside people in their last moments.
Narrator Travis Smith is “inside everything”—ebullient mayflies, skittish deer, and the people around him. He’s privy to how long they’ll live and to every intricacy of their lives, his job to stand witness to people’s dying moments. He’s never challenged this role, even as the ever-present noise sometimes overwhelms him. But Travis finds his isolated, detached life disrupted by Dalia, a midwife, and her two young daughters, who live in the flat across the hall. Through them, he unintentionally becomes a participant in life in a new way. The novel captures the seemingly contradictory idea of beauty in scenes of pain. The violence of a car crash is juxtaposed with the natural world surrounding it, the banality of everyday life continuing even as one life stops. This tension is woven throughout, as readers glimpse Travis’ work as a witness to people’s dying moments. In short passages in which Travis describes a person’s end and salient events in their life, we see a well-etched character for whom death can be relief, terror, or perhaps the ultimate injustice. Author Reeves has a keen eye for the salient detail, making the reader become emotionally invested in characters seen only briefly. As Travis’ narration moves from his work to the quiet yet increasingly meaningful time he spends with his neighbors, it illuminates a microcosm of the cycles of life and death, as glimpsed through the natural world and scenes with community members. Conversations feature crisp dialogue and moments of silence that emphasize how loss and grief can’t always be articulated and comfort can’t always be given. As Travis’ relationships with his neighbors grow, his sense of himself as a person outside his role also evolves, and his job begins to burden him emotionally. Through Travis, we see the beauty of love and small moments of companionship and connection, all the more powerful for the fact of life’s brevity and unpredictable end.
An evocative, kaleidoscopic affirmation of life from the perspective of Death.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781668216361
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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