New Age philosophy deepens this touching but sometimes mysterious coming-of-age story.
Within a framework of New Age interconnectedness, a young woman grows beyond her blighted childhood.
This is the third installment of a thought-provoking New Age fiction series, an exploration of love, loss, enlightenment, and self-discovery written by self-described “intuitive medium” Zani. Readers new to the series will find it more rewarding (and less confusing) to start with volumes 1 and 2 (Piper, Once and Again, 2016, and Waiting for Grace, 2020). The author assumes familiarity with the series’ multiple characters and their backstories, among them Eli Cranston, a lawyer-turned-psychotherapist, father to manipulative, hate-filled Grace and adoptive daughter, Hope, the 18-year-old title character here; and Piper Corcoran, who runs an intuition development group and an equine therapy program. (Horses—their personalities, care, and importance to the humans in their lives—are a significant and well-integrated presence in the story.) Jumping from one character to another in the initial chapters, the narrative suggests, but never fully clarifies all that has gone before. The prologue, which for some time appears to be an unrelated, stand-alone vignette, describes a Marine sergeant under fire in Iraq as he tries to save a grievously wounded “grunt from podunk Massachusetts.” Chapter 1 shifts to Hope, targeted by her sister, Grace (broadly written as an unredeemable mean girl for reasons presumably to be found in Book 2). Chapter 2 introduces Eli, grieving over his mentor and father figure, a Holocaust survivor. Chapters 3 and 4 belong to Piper, returning to her farm in Massachusetts, alluding to a lost love in her past 19th-century life, not explained here. Other characters remain mysteries. How did Piper’s husband, John, save “her life on many levels”? Why did handyman Clem need to find “a place to call home without the weight of the past around his neck”? The narrative gains necessary immediacy when it returns to and sustains Hope’s story—her attempt to have a relationship with her biological mother, a one-dimensional, manipulative addict; her growth toward independence and self-realization; and her moving acceptance of love as a universal continuum.
New Age philosophy deepens this touching but sometimes mysterious coming-of-age story.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781954332546
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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