An allusive, atmospheric exploration of the secrets behind every family’s door.
A Brazilian woman navigates her way through the liminal space between life and death, countries, genders, friends, and people.
Cecília Matzenbacher is 9 years old when we meet her, bouncing along a dusty road in the backcountry of Rio Grande do Sul on the hunt for partridges. With her are her father, two brothers, and a shotgun that will soon play a significant part in Brazilian novelist Bensimon’s layered narrative. Young Ciça isn’t much for killing—of the birds shot from the sky she thinks, “They deserved better”—but she is fascinated by the natural world. In adulthood she becomes a master taxidermist, migrating to the U.S. to spend her days stitching animal skins into recognizable simulacra to populate the dioramas of Bensimon’s meaningful title. She brings secrets with her: Her father, a doctor turned politician, is charged with shooting a colleague and friend, João Carlos Satti, to death. Though she’s well regarded, Cecília’s life is a mess: She’s bounces from town to town, is in a marriage that seems unsalvageable, has a casual but life-changing affair with a young woman (“I make no mention of skinning carcasses, fleshing hides, stitching”), and keeps her distance from her Brazilian kin. But her travails are minor compared with the Satti murder inquiry, which unearths sexual secrets that shock the conservative town of Porto Alegre and threaten to destroy the Matzenbachers. “Don’t look at them,” her father says of the gawkers at the trial, quietly echoing Ciça’s offhand, earlier mention of why one should never look a bear in the eyes: “A bear that meets a human’s gaze always has to obliterate what he sees there.” It works with humans, too, which lends Bensimon’s final sentence in this existential mystery all the more power.
An allusive, atmospheric exploration of the secrets behind every family’s door.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780374616038
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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