A heartfelt exploration of grief, friendship, and second chances.
A grieving widow embarks on the journey of a lifetime in this novel.
When Julia is awakened by a call from an ER doctor in the middle of the night, she can’t believe what she hears: Her husband, James, has died from severe injuries sustained in a high-speed car accident. Returning alone to an empty beach house, Julia struggles to make sense of the night’s events and realizes that he must have been with one of his many girlfriends. Julia’s heartbroken not only by James’s death and their broken marriage, but also by the distance that’s grown between her and her two sons. And so, when her lifelong best friends show up to help her through the funeral, Julia proposes an outlandish idea: She wants to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, 2,000-plus miles of mountainous terrain. Not wanting to let her go alone, Mary Margaret, Casey, and Nate join Julia for a journey that will test their physical and mental limits and the bounds of their friendship, revealing more than a few secrets along the way. Though a departure from Ridenour’s trademark police thriller, the novel retains a touch of her signature style through Casey, a tough-as-nails retired homicide detective. The rest of the characters are equally distinctive, all bringing their own emotional baggage and perspectives to the journey. Along the trail, the friends come face to face with their personal demons, yet they find strength in one another’s support. At the same time, each of the characters tend to reinforce their defining qualities at different points in the novel, making them archetypes rather than fully realized individuals. This impression is reinforced by dialogue that feels overly earnest, leaving little room for emotion to surface naturally and making some exchanges feel performative. Even so, the Appalachian Trail provides a compelling backdrop for the group’s emotional journey, revealing how friendship can sustain us through life’s most difficult seasons.
A heartfelt exploration of grief, friendship, and second chances.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9798897472048
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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