An entertaining combination of sit-com and melodrama.
Butterfield’s sardonic novel chronicles the 40-year friendship of three women.
In 1985, Diane Daly, Nikki Barone, and Orla Nevins are in Indiana, playing the roles of Tevye’s daughters in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Being cast in the summer stock production is a major coup for the struggling actresses, and during the run of the show, despite a few jealousies here and there, they form a tight bond. Forty years later, Diane has just returned to her Santa Monica home after a three-day evacuation due to the wildfire in her area. She is lucky—the fire did not quite reach her over-mortgaged property, though everything is covered in ash. She has been considering suicide, but now that she and her house have survived the fire, she decides the idea of killing herself is absurd (“How selfish to take oneself out of the picture when the picture had changed so dramatically”). She calls to check in with Nikki, who is living in Colorado and wondering why she ever agreed to leave New York. As they talk, they realize neither of them has heard from Orla, although Diane has tried to contact her. Concerned, Diane heads off to New York to find her, with Nikki joining her a couple of days later. Butterfield’s narrative toggles back and forth between the past and present. In alternating chapters, she fills in the protagonists’ backstories and experiences (individually and together) through the decades. Set against the backdrop of civil protests, the AIDS epidemic, the World Trade Center attack, and the Covid-19 pandemic, the story is packed with entertainment-world tidbits and references, cultural signifiers, and the music of a country in constant, rapid change. Diane, Nikki, and the quirky, dramatically romantic Orla differ in temperament and lifestyle choices, each following diverging paths as they do battle with life’s personal and professional slings and arrows, yet always managing to overcome periods of separation and even betrayal to reconnect with one another. Butterfield’s acerbic prose provides ample humor and social commentary, adding a joyful ambiance to a narrative occasionally heavy with emotional baggage and tragedy.
An entertaining combination of sit-com and melodrama.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798999291103
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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