A remarkable debut—both a book for the moment and one that will endure.
A tradwife influencer wakes up to find herself living the old-style life she’s been peddling.
To her millions of followers, Natalie Heller Mills’ life appears perfect: Married to the handsome son of a wealthy, family-values-touting U.S. senator, she spends her days posting content of herself churning butter, baking, and crafting in her impeccable farmhouse kitchen; tending to the chickens and other livestock; and posing with her ever-expanding brood against the picturesque barn and rolling fields of her newly acquired Idaho farm, catchily dubbed “Yesteryear.” But the women who follow her don’t know about the nannies and other modern-day cheats that make the farm and family run. They don’t know Natalie’s husband is soft, shiftless, and perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed. And they certainly don’t know that Natalie is not even close to being the “flawless Christian woman” she projects. “The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to”? Yeah, that’s just for Instagram. When Shannon, the producer Natalie hires to broaden her reach, exposes the disconnect between Online Natalie and Offline Natalie, the influencer’s perfect facade begins to crumble and her dream life becomes a nightmare. After an indeterminate amount of time—“Was it a day, a week, a month?”—Natalie wakes up to find herself in a hardscrabble, early-19th-century version of Yesteryear, with children she doesn’t recognize though they insist they’re hers and a husband who looks, but doesn’t act, like her spouse. How did Natalie get here? Is it a prank, a reality show, time travel? In Natalie, Burke has given us an absolutely riveting character—bitchy, narcissistic, and uncaring, yet also incongruously relatable and wickedly entertaining. As it sends up both MAGA and online culture, this deliciously funny, topical, and fiercely intelligent debut also probes deeper questions about authenticity, ambition, kindness, celebrity, consumerism, and what it means to be a woman in America today. It’s also a propulsive page turner, impossible to put down.
A remarkable debut—both a book for the moment and one that will endure.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780593804216
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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