An engrossing look at academic politics that measures the human cost of devaluing the humanities.
In Schopen’s campus novel, the dean of a Classics department must contend with the interpersonal repercussions of losing his post.
Harry Hoyle is the dean of the Classics department at a nonspecified college somewhere in the high desert. When the new provost moves to shut the department down, Hoyle’s plan to quietly coast into retirement is upended, and he must scramble to reevaluate his own future in addition to those of all of the department’s other members. Strong personalities abound, including the under-competent but overly arrogant Daryl Maugham, who’s determined to press Hoyle into a fruitless lawsuit; the lascivious older professor Lionel Lash, who, as “a star, one of the brightest on campus, his reputation international,” has a secure landing place in Philosophy; the scholars Jim Sally and Marla Wells, each vying for the one available spot teaching Latin in Foreign Languages; and the hapless, peculiar Gwen Harper, whose only focus is her work and the promise she was given that tenure meant lifetime employment. While dealing with these disparate, robustly developed characters, Hoyle must continue to teach classes and process the unexpected news that his wife wants a divorce. The escalation of hostilities in his marriage mirrors the increasing difficulties that Hoyle faces at work, culminating in a dark twist. Schopen’s detailed prose limns a bracing portrait of the ways in which increasingly STEM-focused priorities at the college level affect both the faculty and the student body at large. With its preponderance of collegial debates and classroom issues, the novel occasionally verges on becoming overly insular, but readers with an interest in the academic world will remain engaged. The discussions Hoyle and his students conduct are particularly compelling, both in their interpretations of the Greek tragedies being read and the applications of those lessons to the intrigue unfolding in the novel.
An engrossing look at academic politics that measures the human cost of devaluing the humanities.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798886799811
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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