An immersive psychological portrait of one man’s battle with lifelong anger and guilt.
A young man’s troubles follow him after he trades his spiritual calling for life as a teacher.
Inspired by the life and teachings of Thomas Merton, Niall O’Malley leaves a stressful Ph.D. program to enter a Benedictine monastery in western Massachusetts full of “high hopes for communing with God and soothing his erratic temper.” But after five years, he abruptly abandons the refuge he sought in that religious vocation for a job teaching history at a public high school in a downtrodden town on the New Jersey coast within sight of Manhattan. Despite that fresh start, brightened even more by a blossoming romantic relationship with Lluvia, a kindhearted Puerto Rican immigrant who’s single-mindedly devoted to his happiness, and who he believes “embodied the goodness and joy he’d been seeking,” and a close friendship with his fellow teacher, Trinity, Niall struggles to find fulfillment in his new role, concluding that he’s “not really built for teaching.” One of the major impediments to his job satisfaction is his student Colton Chadwick, the son of a wealthy family whose parents place him in the school in hopes of curing his disciplinary problems. Niall suspects Colton of racist sympathies, and he reinforces his antipathy toward the student by persistently interpreting even the boy’s most innocuous words and actions in a negative light. In spare but quietly eloquent prose, Emmons unobtrusively shifts her story between Niall’s years at the monastery, where his rewarding immersion in the simple daily routine of the contemplative life is marred by an increasingly ominous conflict with his fellow monk Brother Thomas, to his life in the classroom and back again, even briefly exploring the roots of the sometimes-explosive rage that has scarred him since childhood. In the comparatively brief second section of the novel, she fashions a resolution of these parallel plots that honors the depth and complexity of her protagonist’s internal turmoil, as she recognizes that changing one’s life is not as simple as changing its outer circumstances.
An immersive psychological portrait of one man’s battle with lifelong anger and guilt.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781636283623
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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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