A soulful meditation on struggle, hope, and healing.
A traveling musician discovers a child alone in a motel room in Berner’s novella.
Austen is driving to California with his guitar in tow after a breakup, hoping to make his music dreams come true. Austen is staying at a Missouri motel when, after midnight, he hears soft cries from an adjacent room. When the cries escalate to desperate wails, and Austen’s calls to the motel office go unanswered, he investigates. With a knock, the door swings open, revealing a young girl strapped in a car seat. Softly singing “Here Comes the Sun,” Austen gathers the child in his arms and rocks her. When Taylor, the girl’s drug-addicted mother returns to the room, she’s coming down from a pill-high after her attempt to get clean was derailed by shady dealers. Taylor is furious to find a stranger with her daughter (whose name is Grace), but soon realizes she’s been well cared for. Worried about Taylor’s plan to drive in her current state, Austen suggests Taylor and Grace travel with him instead, setting a strange but healing road trip in motion. As Taylor fights the urge to score pills, they visit the Trail of Tears, eat at a roadside taqueria, and sleep under the stars in New Mexico. Along the way, Austen and Taylor share personal details that allow for a deeper understanding of themselves and each other. “We go through life half-asleep,” Taylor muses. “We go from one pleasure or amusement to another over and over again just to stay sane.” Reflections on Indigenous history, war, and school shootings contrast with simple moments like eating ice cream, visiting a gem shop, and Taylor lovingly tending to Grace. Berner’s characters are drawn with humanity, and he explores timely themes with heart, though his tendency to disclose backstory and historical details in an expository, somewhat detached fashion creates a feeling of distance. Still, the hard-won lessons woven throughout will resonate with readers who enjoy an introspective story.
A soulful meditation on struggle, hope, and healing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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