An ambitious and often deeply moving work.
A gangster gets a chance at redemption in Hogue’s supernatural novel.
Eddie Reed grows up in a working-class Chicago family, struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia and chafing under the reins of a father whose rigid expectations mask genuine love. After his brother’s sudden death, Eddie falls in with a local gangster. When the 1918 influenza pandemic claims both his parents, he descends deeper into a life of crime. In 1927, he dies while fleeing a rival gang. In the afterlife, he’s assigned a spiritual mentor named Adi Fattoré, a medieval Italian nobleman atoning for his own sins. Eddie learns that he must remain on Earth as an invisible presence, performing good deeds and learning the lessons he failed to absorb in life. Over nearly 70 years, he watches over the families who move into and out of his childhood home, including a compassionate doctor and his wife, an estranged married couple, and a young family whose daughter becomes, in Eddie’s heart, the child he never had. He also watches over his childhood friend Joe, whose quiet decency serves as a constant contrast to Eddie’s own failures. Through these relationships, Eddie slowly comes to understand what eluded him in life: “A good life is made of little moments of love.” The novel’s central conceit is genuinely inventive, and the author maps Eddie’s spiritual evolution with real skill. References to Dante’s Inferno add literary texture without becoming heavy-handed. But Eddie’s actions as an invisible guardian angel—nudging people away from danger, whispering comfort to the grieving, calming a fractious puppy—grow repetitive, and the interventions begin to feel formulaic rather than surprising. Still, the story’s inventive structure and emotional intelligence outweigh its episodic lulls. The novel is strongest when Eddie functions as a witness, not a savior, taking in the messy complexity of human life rather than tidily resolving its crises.
An ambitious and often deeply moving work.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781952526329
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Waters Edge Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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