Engagingly spooky when not lost in the weeds.
A ghostwriter collaborates with his literary idol in Warner’s horror novel.
The story begins with an unnerving prologue in which the chief of a volunteer fire department sees a giant beast launch its body at his car. He stumbles out to find a mysterious woman in a green cloak, who says she has a job for him. Before long, he has attacked a woman he used to know, seemingly in a trance. But this is all just a fantasy, scribbled notes from the pen of Martin Knight, an English professor at the University of Iowa. What follows are a series of chapters (each introduced with the subtitle “a novel by Martin Knight”) introducing the reader to a new assistant professor at the university named John Sterling—though he is also referred to as Jack, somewhat interchangeably (and confusingly). Sterling is also a writer and has published a novel inspired by the pulp horror stories of his favorite author, Martin Knight. After a lengthy introduction to Sterling’s family and a series of hallucinatory scenes that may or may not actually be occurring—the assistant professor regularly wakes to find scribbled notes or evidence that some of his dreams are real—Sterling finally meets the legendary Martin Knight and is offered a position as his ghostwriter. In this nesting-doll narrative, the shifting character names and layers of meaning within the story become more than a little confusing. The female characters aren’t particularly well-realized; when they aren’t hectoring the men, they are undoing their bra straps to reveal their “well-endowed bosom[s].” Still, Warner’s lucid prose (“The front door was still closed, but the hole had widened to the size of a dinner plate. Cathy saw the clown’s face peer through the jagged opening, and a white-gloved hand reached inside to feel around for the lock”) generates effective scares.
Engagingly spooky when not lost in the weeds.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9798992005967
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Jupiter & Phoebus Publishing House
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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