If this is a character-driven novel, somebody really needs to put their foot on the gas.
College friends meet up at a Wild West–themed wedding venue in the Texas Hill Country.
Bride-to-be Elaine Wheeler has put them all together at the “queer table"—Fin Hightower and Jacque Aguilar, her closest male and female friends from their University of Texas days; Todd and David King, a not-very-happy married couple; a former co-worker named Marina, described as a “Cara Delevingne lesbian.” These five would “form a unit with each other because there were no others to form one with,” a phrase that seems to presage the energy level of what’s to come. The older friends plan to initiate the newer ones into a tradition they call “the Hour of Disrespect,” for which everyone saves up their peeves and criticisms for a group venting session. Flashbacks to iterations of this tradition from previous weddings are sprinkled throughout, but they are somehow never snarky enough, funny enough, or outrageous enough to move this novel into The People We Hate at the Wedding territory (which you might guess by comparing the titles). In between these interludes and many digressive backstories (including, for example, excerpts from Fin’s late mother’s diary), a jampacked itinerary of events has been scheduled for the guests at the Hill Country Hideout. Minor mishaps plague the lassoing contest and the s’mores bonfire, but nothing goes as badly as the river float, where minor violence breaks out and local law enforcement gets involved. Fin’s reluctant feelings about his own recent engagement to a handsome Canadian man have led him to keep the news from his dearest friends, but as buried secrets go, this is pretty weak tea. In both of his preceding novels, The Old Place (2022) and Four Squares (2024), Finger proved he can spin out page-turning plots and make us care about his characters, but sadly he doesn’t pull off either one here.
If this is a character-driven novel, somebody really needs to put their foot on the gas.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9798217045976
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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