A gripping tale of brutal murder, betrayal, and redemption that will challenge readers’ assumptions.
A bleak novel focuses on a teen’s fight to survive in rural Missouri.
Sixteen-year-old Dannie Gail Posey and her sister, Carley, scrape out a meager existence in East Egypt, Missouri. Their mother dropped them on the doorstep of their Uncle Smith and his handicapped mother, Aunt Esther, when they were little—and Dannie has dreamed of getting out ever since. When Carley disappears, no one thinks much of it at first since she’s always getting into trouble. But then she’s reported dead in Stinson Creek, and chaos ensues. Sheriff Del Hampton tells Uncle Smith that Carley was likely raped before being killed and dumped in the creek. The prime suspects? The members of the Lynch family. After all, “the Poseys had always hated the Lynches; the Lynches hated everyone else. There had been bad blood between the families” for longer than Dannie could remember. As an all-out war between the feuding families threatens to boil over, Uncle Smith goes on the offensive, while Dannie takes it upon herself to learn what really happened to her sister. Along the way, she learns a shocking truth about her family that changes everything. With haunting prose (Dannie “tossed a tail of dark hair, shiny as a grackle’s wing, over her shoulder. Her skin was translucent, revealing heart-breakingly delicate green veins that crisscrossed just beneath the surface of her pale face”), Dean deftly creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and desperation that practically seeps out of the pages. Dannie’s attempts to make sense of both her past and present echo protagonists’ struggles in some classic Southern novels, with this grim, twisty tale providing its own cast of memorable characters. And perhaps most impressively of all, every bit of the story’s tension manages to implode in a jaw-dropping final act.
A gripping tale of brutal murder, betrayal, and redemption that will challenge readers’ assumptions.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798373634687
Page Count: 321
Publisher: Cowboy Jamboree Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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