A thoughtful exploration of boyhood, achievement, and friendship that’s sometimes weighed down by its seriousness.
In Jacobs’ novel, two boys form a turbulent friendship at an elite prep school in late-1970s Southern California.
Luke Burnett has once again found himself in the crosshairs of school bully Lance Drexx when he’s unexpectedly rescued by Denny Drummond, a computer prodigy who befriends famed physicist Richard Feynman. As the two start high school at Stone Canyon Prep, an intense institution of learning for the scions of Southern California’s power players, they bond over their tumultuous home lives. Denny helps Luke succeed in his math and science classes, while Luke tutors him in the humanities. Over the years, they witness a science experiment gone awry that leads to two students being expelled, are flummoxed by the addition of female students to their previously all-male student body, and narrowly avoid trouble when a performance-enhancing scheme gone wrong sends members of the basketball team to the hospital. One night after graduation, Denny cracks under the stress from his family situation and commits an act that will reverberate through his adult life. Years later, he reaches out to Luke for one last favor. After all this time, what holds their friendship together? Jacobs’ novel excels at portraying the rarefied world of an elite prep school and depicting the wild, sometimes slightly implausible, hijinks that the students get up to. The language is frequently a stumbling block, however; the dense prose has a distancing effect, blunting the adolescent sense of immediacy that the author endeavors to capture. (“A sea of eyeballs from summer-sunned faces, mine included, rotated upward toward the rebuilt ceiling bankrolled by the female surge in enrollment.”) Denny is a difficult character, a computer science prodigy who torches his own future multiple times. He drops in and out of his friends’ lives, making them the targets of his mood swings, but Luke’s empathy for him, built on the knowledge of his secrets, will help to secure readers’ compassion.
A thoughtful exploration of boyhood, achievement, and friendship that’s sometimes weighed down by its seriousness.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781644284926
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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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