An engaging drama with a strong cast and a final surprise.
In this novel, the lives of two women briefly intersect at a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Arrowhead, where Cabin Five has held a secret for almost three decades.
Annie Parker, the primary narrator of Braun’s series opener, is a child when she; her older sister, Loni; and their parents begin spending summers at their Lake Arrowhead house in California. Annie loves the natural surroundings and quiet respite from busy Long Beach. Her parents sell the summer house when she is 16 years old, but as an adult, when a crisis develops in her marriage, she returns to the tranquility of Lake Arrowhead. She rents a small cabin at a B&B, where she hopes to sort out a new trajectory for her life. Although the bulk of the narrative belongs to Annie, there are short interludes narrated by Alyce Murphy, an only child who was born in 1934 and raised in Paramount, California. Despite her family’s financial struggles during the Depression and her father being drafted to serve in World War II, Alyce describes a relatively carefree early childhood. Everything changes in 1947, when her father’s lifeless body is discovered in a cabin at Lake Arrowhead (“That was the year my father left and never came home again”). It will take almost 30 years for her mother to reveal the grisly truth about her father’s death. Now, she visits the mountain retreat to search Cabin Five for any remnant of her father’s final day. Braun, who has a personal connection to Lake Arrowhead, skillfully uses the silent cabins as the vehicle for bringing together disparate characters, if only momentarily. The author writes that the next two installments of the trilogy, continuations of Annie’s story, will bring additional offspring of long-dead guests of the cabins back to the mountains to recapture pieces of their pasts. In this unpredictable volume, Annie is a likable and sturdy female lead gradually rebuilding her life professionally and romantically. And Alyce’s tale offers an engrossing, poignant subplot. Conversational prose filled with Lake Arrowhead atmospherics sets a comfortable pace, notwithstanding a few too many forays into the minute decorating details of Annie’s renovation projects.
An engaging drama with a strong cast and a final surprise.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64704-464-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Marble Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
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
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