A riveting tale about friendship and betrayal set in Yosemite.
Two women go hiking in California and encounter more danger than they ever expected in this novel.
Kate Johnson visited Yosemite National Park regularly when she was growing up. She returns now as an adult with her friend Veronica Hammond, who is going through a messy divorce. On their first night, they meet Darren and Maddock, fellow campers who invite them to a party. They decline, which is just as well. Darren and Maddock aren’t just innocently camping nearby; they’ve been paid to commit a serious crime. The next day, Kate and Veronica meet a man named Nash while hiking; he’s mysterious, and Veronica doesn’t trust him. While savoring Yosemite’s sights, Kate and Veronica talk a lot about weighty matters, including Veronica’s divorce, which stems from her husband’s leaving her for a younger woman. Veronica is bitter about that event as well as the glass ceiling she keeps hitting in her technology career. As the two women hike, they encounter Nash again. They also keep running into Darren and Maddock. The suspicious pair are clearly trying to kidnap Kate and Veronica, but Nash foils the plot. Nash, a retired soldier, was involved in an incident that made the news a year ago, one that Kate remembers. Once she works out who he really is, they start to bond and Nash reveals that he’s on the run from the law. Everyone hiking in Yosemite seems to have secrets. And Veronica’s secret is perhaps the greatest one of all and the most unexpected. Catron’s gripping story delivers a lot of intriguing twists and turns, and the big reveal is a shocking one. But the novel takes a while to get there. The tale reads a bit like a travelogue, and Kate sometimes speaks as if she’s a park official citing facts from a website—“Four million people visit Yosemite each year. The park has twelve hundred square miles, but the vast majority never venture beyond the valley’s seven square miles.” While hikers will appreciate these informative details, they bog down the first third of the book. Still, patient readers will enjoy the thrilling action that follows.
A riveting tale about friendship and betrayal set in Yosemite.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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