A sharply observed and written tale that never seems to add up to much.
Looking for love during America’s Second Civil War can be tricky.
The mutation of the nation’s current political dysfunction into actual civil war is fast becoming a go-to setting for contemporary fiction, but debut novelist Grillo puts a new spin on it by focusing on the romantic misadventures of Hestia, whose husband recently left her to join a pro-Union paramilitary group. The marriage was already shaky, so she’s checking out online dating sites but finds that it’s hard to avoid flirting with guys on the other side. Hestia lives in Baltimore, and there are plenty of Confederate sympathizers in the border state of Maryland. Her own parents are just about to move to one of the 12 seceded states, and it becomes clear over the course of the novel that their dismissive comments about the United States Hestia supports are part of a lifelong pattern of undermining her that clearly contributes to her tendency to eventually find reasons to dump any man unwise enough to show that he likes her. Grillo deftly spins a busy plot that also include Hestia’s friendship with Mildred, an elderly resident at the retirement village where she works, and her growing attachment to her brother-in-law, Jamie, who is raising three kids on his own after his wife was killed in a Confederate terrorist attack. The author’s undeniable point is that daily life goes on even in extreme circumstances; people choose restaurants and places to walk based on the updates in their Safe Zones app, but they continue to eat out and spend time outdoors just the same. The salty comments of Mildred and the village residents participating in Hestia’s oral history project provide welcome relief from Hestia’s often mopey narration, and the characters and social backdrop are equally well drawn, but in the end it’s hard to see why we should care.
A sharply observed and written tale that never seems to add up to much.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60997-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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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