A novel that ably shows how one moment can forever change a life.
In Helpingstine’s coming-of-age novel, a teenager’s life is forever changed after he fatefully kisses his teacher.
Don Hathaway, a 17-year-old high school student, is dealing with more than the average teenager. He’s just lost his father, a firefighter, in a tragic work-related accident. In the aftermath of his father’s death, Don bears the weight of his mother’s emotions and expectations. During his father’s funeral, Don sees his best friend, Jay, and his sister, Alice, who catches his eye but is seven years his senior. “How are you holding up, Don,” she asks during this first meeting, and for the first time in ages, Don feels seen. She later becomes his English teacher and, over the course of a year, helps to inspire him to become a writer, but his feelings for her throw his life into confusion and affect the relationships he’s maintained with girls his own age. At the end of his final English class before his graduation, the 18-year-old Don kisses Alice, which will change the course of both of their lives. She loses her job over the incident, and she ends things before they go any further—although she says that she has no regrets about the kiss. Don struggles to balance his grief and depression over losing his father, and he has trouble with relationships with young women in his college classes. The book then flashes forward to Don in his early 20s. He’s now a reporter at a newspaper, where he learns that Alice has written a novel that was largely inspired by their relationship—and he’s been assigned to interview her. This book tackles serious questions about relationships, showing how the relationship between Don and his former teacher introduces complications that will have serious effects on his later life: “All the stuff about our age difference made sense,” narrates Don, remembering how things ended with Alice, “but I wasn’t comprehending why two people who cared about each other couldn’t be together.” As a reporter, Don’s objectivity about Alice even comes into question; he also reports on a book-banning initiative, which introduces other salient issues.
A novel that ably shows how one moment can forever change a life.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798901743171
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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