A compelling relationship tale that explores two lives over a half-century.
A lifelong love story—with obstacles—moves from 1970s Texas to present-day New York City.
In this debut novel, two Texas farm kids with big dreams fall in love as teens, split up, reconnect as adults, break up again, and finally come together at a crucial moment. Aspiring artist Leni O’Hare meets Cal McGrath when she impulsively runs away from home after her mother tries to sell her beloved horse, Foggy. Cal has a contentious relationship with his father, a self-made businessman who wants his son to take over the ranching and oil drilling instead of going to college to study physics. The teen knows Leni as the younger sister of his football teammate Foy O’Hare. But Cal quickly connects with Leni, and they swiftly fall for each other. When Foy dies from heat exhaustion at football practice, Cal and Leni are both devastated. Their relationship suffers ups and downs as they deal with their grief, and they are soon making plans to leave Texas together to pursue their passions for physics and art. When Leni gets pregnant, she keeps it a secret from Cal and flees her home with the help of his older brother, Hank, before giving the baby up for adoption. A decade later, Leni and Cal are both in New York, working in art and finance, when their paths cross again. Their romance quickly reignites. A disagreement drives them apart again, and they spend the next 30 years pursuing their own paths until a sudden reconciliation occurs. The story is a compelling one, with Leni and Cal’s relationship at its core. The two come across as fully realized characters, not just star-crossed lovers. Brown brings both the Texas and New York settings to life, and complex secondary characters, especially Foy and Hank, add to the novel’s richness. There are minor stylistic problems (particularly the odd phonetic rendering of several French accents) but they do not detract much from the character-driven narrative. The book explores questions of independence, responsibility, family, and authenticity while telling a page-turning story that will keep readers invested.
A compelling relationship tale that explores two lives over a half-century.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781647422981
Page Count: 408
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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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