Misogyny, classism, colorism, hypocrisy: begone! A fierce, fabulous and very funny truth-teller cometh to take you down.
A rollicking satire of Black megachurch culture featuring an irresistible fireball of a protagonist.
Philyaw follows a much-lauded story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), with a debut novel that reads as if she’s channeling the authentic voice of the biggest, baddest, most profoundly un-churchy church lady of all time. Married to Pastor David Freeman, Scharisse Freeman is the first lady of the 25,000-member Hope in Christ Baptist Church, a spiritual and business empire headquartered in Belleton, Georgia. We meet her backstage at the First Lady USA Pageant, an event she has been shut out of for years due to her rough background, the daughter of a teen mother who died young with no connection to the hierarchy of church lineage, a “rags-to-Rolex story,” as she puts it. And though a first lady is meant to epitomize the model of feminine subservience described in Proverbs 31, a Bible passage included at the front for the uninitiated, Scharisse could not be less interested in getting up while it is still night and preparing food or selecting wool and working with eager hands. She is a self-described “brand whore” and fashion diva who sees her wifely duty as keeping Pastor David busy in the bedroom and attending to the needs of her moody, hypercritical teenage daughter, Gabrielle. Yet this iconoclasm is belied by a burning need to win the approval of the holier-than-thou first lady clique, a project made even more difficult by secrets and scandals that erupt during the year leading up to the pageant. Scharisse is an irresistible character, more Prometheus than Proverbs 31, and readers will be rooting for her every step of the way, even as some of those steps are clearly faux pas. Philyaw’s vibrantly voicey tale will appeal to both insiders and outsiders of the culture it describes, a Crazy Rich Asians–style visit to a rarefied realm, but with much more hot sex. At 40, Scharisse is a woman deeply in touch with her physical needs. By the time she takes the stage at First Lady USA, she is also in touch with her soul.
Misogyny, classism, colorism, hypocrisy: begone! A fierce, fabulous and very funny truth-teller cometh to take you down.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780063383074
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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