A tender family story with familiar beats, elevated by strong characters and engaging prose.
Haas’ novel follows a woman as she confronts her difficult past and uncovers long-buried family secrets.
Twenty-eight-year-old writer Charlotte Sutton is drawn back to her hometown of Lakeside, Ohio, by a cryptic voicemail about her father, Chuck, a beloved local celebrity now slipping into the fog of Alzheimer’s. When she arrives, she finds her father’s newspaper and marina businesses faltering, her former classmates still simmering with old grudges, and, most shocking of all, a teenage half-brother named Adam. “Chuck could as easily have raised a baseball bat, slicing it through the air again and again to shatter her heart into pieces she’d never be able to glue back together,” she reflects as she considers the implications of a half-brother she has never known. Charlotte is, at first, determined to straighten out her father’s affairs and return to Pittsburgh as quickly as possible, but instead she stays to confront her memories, her father’s neglect, and her own bitterness. The narrative alternates between the past and present as Charlotte reconnects with estranged figures like her childhood sweetheart, Sammy, whom she abandoned. Meanwhile, the quick progression of Chuck’s illness means that Charlotte may have to stay longer than anticipated, but also that there isn’t much time to reckon with her parents’ betrayals, her responsibility regarding Adam, and the possibility of reshaping her life. Haas writes with skill and assurance, rendering the waterfront community in vivid detail and giving Charlotte’s inner conflicts emotional depth without slowing the story’s momentum. Her prose is grounded and filled with flashes of sardonic wit, like when Charlotte describes her hometown as “a step back in time—like being dropped onto an old-timey movie set.” Though some flashbacks to middle school feel tangential and unnecessary, the novel succeeds as a moving account of strained family bonds, illness, and second chances. Its themes may be familiar, but Haas’ strong character work and carefully drawn setting elevate the sweet and resonant material.
A tender family story with familiar beats, elevated by strong characters and engaging prose.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781645382386
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Ten16 Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2025
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
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