Brittle lampooning mellows into domestic comedy complete with talking animals and a fairy-tale ending.
Consumerism, class snobbery, and greed are major targets—along with bad manners and scam artists—in this social satire set among the moneyed denizens of Belleport, a gated community in post-pandemic Greenwich, Connecticut.
The Belleport women’s chat group serves as an effective Greek chorus, not only commenting on events but subtly offering hints to attentive readers about revelations to come. Many of those events and revelations revolve around Alan and Vivian Anderson, a Midwestern couple who relocated from Chicago to Belleport four years earlier, just as Covid-19 hit. Creative director of the successful ad agency he co-owns, 50-ish Alan is used to winning international awards and giant accounts like John Deere. Driven by equally grand but more domestic ambitions, Vivian has set out to rebrand herself as a New England socialite despite her humble working-class background. She has scheduled the building of an expensive swimming pool and, more importantly, has positioned herself to enter the fastidiously cutthroat competition for admission to Belleport’s exclusive women’s social club, the Queen Annes. Inevitably, Alan and Vivian find themselves at cross purposes. Alan loses the $14,000,000 U.S. Dairy account when a farmer named Daniel Ellery, meant to represent an ordinary dairy farmer at Alan’s big pitch, instead proclaims that the world needs less milk, less advertising, less excess all-around. Initially despondent, Alan begins to agree with Daniel. He dons a flowing white shirt, stops wearing shoes, and moves into the abandoned playhouse in the backyard. Vivian believes her dreams are being thwarted by Alan, but also by her daughters. Fifteen-year-old Bailey’s “kinesthetic learning style” is unacceptable at Greenwich’s best private school, and 12-year-old Sunny can talk to animals, a bizarre twist within a generally realistic novel. The tone proves confusing. Alan, Vivian, and the insufferable Queen Anne matriarchs are initially drawn in harsh, cartoonish strokes, but Maum then pulls back on the snark, ultimately asking readers to empathize with the clueless, privileged residents of Belleport.
Brittle lampooning mellows into domestic comedy complete with talking animals and a fairy-tale ending.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780316599108
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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