Original and hilarious, this novel about a Gen X midlife crisis reveals that base instincts can coexist with the maternal.
A roman à clef disguised as a murder mystery, or vice versa? Either way, the suburban mother who narrates the story has to contend with a lot of trouble.
Perdita Jungfrau and Theo Vestergaard have two young children, son Atticus and daughter Honor, and live in San Diego. Everything should be coming up roses, but Perdie is unhappy with her lot: What happened to her feminist rockabilly band? Why does Theo gag whenever he’s asked to change a diaper? Will Atticus ever outgrow his pernicious allergies? Perdie spends most of her time watching true-crime shows while she nurses Atticus. She loves America’s Worst Murders Ever because “you always find out who did it in the end.” One day, her neighbor Jill’s roofer takes a bad fall and Perdie’s rush to his aid may, as she tells everyone, have saved his life. She takes a bad fall, too, metaphorically speaking, and decides she’s in love with Fernando Acuña. The narrative cuts from the early days of their flirtation in 2007 ahead to 2010, when everyone is shocked to discover Nando has been fatally shot at close range in an apparent robbery. Perdie’s narration, via Neyenesch’s prose, is mordantly funny and perfectly pitched, whether describing married sex (she says Theo was like an “asshole roommate” who “smelled good, and he knew how to make me come”) or the fact that her troubled brother Spencer imagines beating his steakhouse customers “over the head with the long-ass peppermill.” However, the humor shares space with unease. Nando’s girlfriend, Charleigh, seems to be stalking Perdie, showing up in her Volkswagen Beetle wearing green aviator sunglasses, while detectives question Perdie and her divorced parents about convicted felon Spencer’s whereabouts. Is it possible that, despite finding her soul mate, Perdie knew nothing about Nando? Anyone who has ever felt estranged from their nearest and dearest will appreciate how Perdie manages to take back control of her own life.
Original and hilarious, this novel about a Gen X midlife crisis reveals that base instincts can coexist with the maternal.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781668213124
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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