Acker is fearless in her skewering of Black respectability politics, white philanthropy, and the price of ambition.
Could nostalgia for sitcoms like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Jeffersons be the cure for a fictional version of dementia called Blacktimer’s?
A treatment for dementia is one of many hot topics Acker circles in this crazy salad of a novel, combining social satire with an edge of dark fantasy in her follow-up to the story collection Training School for Negro Girls (2018). It opens at a Juneteenth celebration held by an elite Washington, D.C., social club called The Tenth, referring to Du Bois’ Talented Tenth. Taking over the reins of the organization from her ultraconservative mother, Nina Johnson plans to reinvent it for changing times. Arriving on the arm of her boyfriend, Booker T. Bruce, the favorite in an upcoming mayoral election, it looks like Nina has her ambitious dreams on lock. But then her mother insists she participate in a wildly politically incorrect stage re-enactment of the events of 1865 in which Nina is forced to darken her light skin with bronzer and sing a jazzy version of “We Shall Overcome”—a performance referred to by her activist sister, Bett, as “coonery” and “a minstrel show.” Acker has just begun to unleash the gale force of this edgy satire, which is about to take a sharp turn into a second major plotline, this one verging on the surreal. After the event, Nina is approached by a white woman offering a huge donation to The Tenth if Nina commits the group to supporting the woman’s experimental mental health facility. After receiving the first in a promised series of $50,000 donations, Nina arrives with her sister and two best friends for a one-week visit, only to find that the place revolves around the recreated set of a fictional 1990s sitcom called Coolin’ Out With the Johnsons. They are relieved of their car keys, given matching ’90s wardrobes, and shown to a room with bunk beds and a Janet Jackson poster. The patients all wear headphones that loop the show’s soundtrack. Is this really supposed to cure dementia? Or is something more malevolent going on?
Acker is fearless in her skewering of Black respectability politics, white philanthropy, and the price of ambition.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780593597507
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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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