An involving tale that balances struggle, love, and hope.
The first novel in McBride’s series explores second chances during Covid-19.
Katie Young, an IT systems director who’s nearly 50, feels adrift as a new empty nester in her small town near Occoquan, Virginia. It’s the early 2020s, and Covid, quarantines, office shutdowns, and furloughs are everywhere. Her daughter, Belle, heads to college, and Katie lands a new job in Miami. A lifelong boater, she meets James Conway “JC” Bland III at a Miami marina; a whirlwind romance leads to a quick marriage proposal. Despite nagging doubts, she says yes. JC’s yacht becomes a metaphor for their damaged marriage. (“She saw the imperfections first. The crazing in the porthole glass, faded curtains, a water stain in the ceiling.”) The newlyweds sail to Key West, snorkel at Dry Tortugas National Park, and party with new friends and fellow boaters, including Rhiannon and her husband, Corde. McBride ably limns the women as they develop their friendship, sharing confidences and “quarantinis” at bonfires with the other “Beach Bonfire Babes.” Life shifts abruptly, however, when Katie’s mother contracts Covid and dies. Katie moves into Bonnie Brae, her childhood Virginia home, to settle the estate. We learn more about Bonnie Brae, a “red-roofed Cape Cod” that abuts the Potomac River (“The shoreline was right on a protected bay across from a national wildlife refuge”). She finds strength to assess her new marriage and to plan her future with help from friends and Deke, who works for the Potomac Science Center and shares many common interests with Katie. McBride adeptly intertwines the lives of Katie and Rhiannon, and themes of love, family, loss, and betrayal emerge. The author sets a vivid scene (“The sun was just rising in the east, and a white layer of fog rose from the surface of the water as if the river was lifting its bedtime blanket”), and her storytelling consistently engages.
An involving tale that balances struggle, love, and hope.Pub Date: April 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798990295803
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Make Waves Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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