A self-assured debut that is also a warning.
A treatment center’s planned relocation is upended by the effects of climate change.
The first words from Beatrice, the narrator of Nolan’s debut novel, are, “I lived in a box in the desert.” But it wasn’t always a desert; climate change has permanently altered the landscape of the northeast Texas town of Askewn, where Beatrice works as a coordinator at Twin Bridge Residential Treatment Center. The facility, “home for the traumatized/neglected/abused/criminal, oblivion addicts as a rule,” houses teenage girls. It’s run by a social services company that has partnered with a pharmaceutical outfit, which plies the girls with BeZen, a drug that seems to be effective at treating their mental illnesses. Beatrice and her co-workers are planning to move the home to Atlanta if her report on the girls’ reaction to BeZen is approved, but two things get in the way: bureaucracy, of course, but also a heatwave that sparks a power grid failure that throws much of the state into anarchy. Ordered to evacuate, Beatrice, a few of her co-workers, and seven of the girls decide to head to Georgia anyway, where there may or may not be a place for them. Things get bad, and then they get worse when the BeZen runs out. Beatrice, whose memories of her own unhappy childhood are seamlessly integrated into the narrative, proves to be a memorable character, as does Teresa, the oldest girl in the center, whose battle with her demons Nolan portrays beautifully. While the subject matter is as serious as can be, Nolan leavens the novel with gallows humor: At one point in their journey, Beatrice’s search terms include “how smuggle best child drug withdrawal” and “mississippi how easy swim dead drowned missing die”. The darkness of this excellent novel is amplified by how terrifyingly plausible it all is.
A self-assured debut that is also a warning.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781662603280
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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