An ambitious and heartfelt debut.
As Atlanta prepares for the 1996 Olympics, two young Black men deal with challenges at work and in their personal lives.
Jacob is a Brooklyn native, staying on in Atlanta after graduating from Morehouse to take a job with a real estate developer who has won the contract to “revitaliz[e]” (aka destroy and gentrify) the Black neighborhoods near the Olympic Village. He knows he’s gay, but has had very little experience and has not come out to his parents. He works closely with Daniel, an Atlanta native whose white mother has recently died without ever having explained to him how he is Black while his siblings and her husband are all white. Daniel, too, is dealing with confusion about his sexuality. As the book lays it out, in characteristically passionate prose, “Was a life—this life—between two Black men possible? Two Black men in love and protecting each other against whatever was out there in the world, moving together toward an unknown future?” The dual aspirations of this debut novel—to create a detailed, fact-based portrait of Atlanta on the cusp of change and to depict the pressures on gay Black men coming of age in the 1990s—are both realized, the former with detailed research about the specific neighborhoods involved, the latter with intense dramatic situations and inner monologues. Anger breaks through in fistfights, verbal showdowns, and a near-riot. Sometimes, the author seems not to trust us to keep the stakes and the big picture in mind. In the middle of a conversation with a new man in his life, Jacob begins ruminating on “the conversation that lurked just beneath their discussion” and “the unvoiced masculinity code,” themes already strongly articulated in the novel. During a tense meeting in the school principal’s office about a teacher who has made a remark about Daniel’s parentage, obviously different than his siblings’, it occurs to Daniel’s mother that “life roamed beyond them in that office—wild, reckless, unpredictably wonderful and unexpected. Life, large and sweeping, filled with gasps of intensity and excitement.” These are lovely observations but seem unlikely to have occurred to her in the moment. Another issue is that Jacob and Daniel’s boss, a white woman, is a two-dimensional villain, though her portrayal is explicitly linked to “the history of what little Black boys and little white girls have always been told about each other.”
An ambitious and heartfelt debut.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781668016282
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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