Keening, darkly funny, and gruffly tender.
An English teacher, now immobilized by a stroke, recalls his star pupil.
John Keating’s edgy first-person narrative jumps around over the decades from 1987 to 2021, studded with brilliant character sketches. Chief among them are Keating’s fellow teacher and former girlfriend, Enid Smeal, a dedicated artist with little time for personal interactions; her awkward son, Jacob; the boy’s classmate Clara Hightower, serious and calm beyond her years; and smarmy Richard Kingsley Madison IV, head of St. George’s, the private K-8 school where Keating teaches. Richy, as Keating delights in cheekily calling him, is obsessed with improving St. George’s endowment and reputation. Key to this goal is Clara, who first comes to Keating’s attention at Jacob’s 6th birthday party and by the time she arrives in his 8th grade classroom is clearly brilliant and destined for success that Richy hopes will burnish the school’s reputation. Jacob, smart but resolutely underperforming in school and uncomfortable in social situations, becomes her unlikely boyfriend and, after she breaks up with him when they’re headed for separate high schools, painfully in love with her for the rest of his life. As he chronicles their adult lives and his own marriage, Keating sprinkles an often sad story with knock-knock jokes and other forms of humor, frequently pausing to explain why they’re funny—“Telling people why things are funny can be funny too,” he asserts. We come to realize that under his sardonic exterior he is a ferociously dedicated teacher whose mocking self-assessment (“I am desperate for notice.…[I] created a world where I could be the king of my own tiny realm”) masks genuine love and concern for his students. The circumstances leading to his stroke are eventually revealed, as is Clara’s unexpected post-school trajectory, but what will stick with readers most are the multi-dimensional portraits of complicated, flawed human beings, most notably the novel’s narrator.
Keening, darkly funny, and gruffly tender.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780316576956
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
