A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.
In the third installment of the Happy Valley Chronicles, second grader Celia Canterberry faces the seemingly impossible task of making new friends while dealing with human and imaginary enemies.
Seven-year-old Celia is distraught when her best friend, Archibald Quigley, abandons her for Eugenia Whitford—the niece of Enid Whitford, her grandmother’s employer whom Celia calls her “number one nemesis.” Celia’s teacher, Miss Dobbs, shamelessly favors Eugenia, hoping to win the heart of the youngster’s recently widowed father. Celia turns to her neighbor Old Lady Griggs for advice on how to make friends. Griggs is invested in helping Celia connect with others, drawing on tips from Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. However, most of these strategies—sometimes due to Celia’s mistaken interpretations—don’t quite turn out as they’d hoped. Celia has impatience beyond her years that effectively furnishes the story with a tone of comedic grumpiness; for example, when Miss Dobbs has the class celebrate a Halloween “Spooktacular,” featuring presentations on notable Happy Valleyans, the girl is utterly annoyed: “As if a seven-year-old could scrounge up a useful and brand-new nugget of information. I mean, I could, but not the rest of these numbskulls.” Nan, her grandmother, instills in her a love for literature; they have a book club in which they read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, from which excerpts are quoted. Indeed, there are countless references to 19th- and 20th-century European and American literature and popular culture, which some readers will find delightful. Celia’s boundless imagination produces her “storybook” friends with whom she either interacts or whom she embodies during make-believe play. Readers may want to brush up on Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre, and The Scarlet Pimpernel before reading to avoid missing out on the nuances that these tales provide to this story. Overall, some will find this work to be reminiscent of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, although it’s aimed at an adult readership. Froese’s simple black-and-white line drawings depict various people and events in the text.
A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Black Crow Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
