Castellani creates a poignant reflection on love and loss in the stories of his lost boys—and the people they’ve left behind.
A brooding, lyrical story about the preciousness of life brought to us by the voices of the dead.
Caleb Aldrich, Steven Donovan, Matthew Cardullo, and Leo Ridgeway never met until the afterlife: four attractive young men who vanish at pivotal moments in their lives, their bodies eventually found in icy rivers across the U.S. Through a vague process they call “summoning,” they are able to share with each other the stories of how they lived and died, creating a fragile companionship in an opaque limbo. “We are those boys they keep finding in the river,” says Matthew, a college wrestling champ whose obsessiveness ruins his relationship with his girlfriend. “I floated alone on the surface of the Huron, trapped between ice and sky…I was terrified, until I heard their voices.” Castellani approaches his characters with deep empathy, tracing their attempts at love and human connection despite frequent bitter disappointments and heartbreaking losses. A true-crime thread runs through the narrative—media and online chatter speculate that the four (and others) are victims of the Smiley Face Killers, a shadowy network of men hunting college-aged boys—but this element ultimately matters far less than the intimate testimonies of the dead and those who loved them. Castellani unfolds each story through a variety of forms—traditional narration, text message threads, emails, media interviews—all of which suggest the brittleness of human communication and how easily meanings can get lost in between the lines. There’s also a touch of the supernatural in this story—a dresser drawer suddenly flung open or the honking horn of a car kept in storage—that shows how the dead create signs of their presence in the physical world. Even though the crime-mystery framing adds some suspense, it’s an unnecessary gimmick next to the moving portraits of lives cut short and lessons learned by the survivors.
Castellani creates a poignant reflection on love and loss in the stories of his lost boys—and the people they’ve left behind.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9798217061037
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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