Part satire, part wake-up call, and all openhearted perspective, this debut promises excellent work to come from its author.
In 1996 Gulf Coast Texas, a one-time high school football star sets his sights on winning the regional World’s Strongest Man contest, with disastrous results.
Teddy Riggs prefers to be known as Daytona: “Fastest on the field. Fastest on the road.” Third-generation scion of an oil family, he’s been cut off from his trust fund by his parents and lives with Granny, who will cook him a dozen eggs to slake the appetite he’s developed on “the juice.” His “roid rage” shows up in present-day fights at his old athletic fields, as well as flashbacks to incidents that have him banned from multiple Corpus Christi gyms. Teddy is in a downward spiral (think classic losers from Thelma and Louise to Richard Russo’s Hank Devereaux Jr.), but author Buxton allows him to develop as he falls, including a sexual awakening and nascent sense of purpose. These flickers of growth will keep readers rooting for Teddy even when he’s in the midst of irrational actions and complicated manipulations of friends and family members, trying every way he can to shake people down for money—often to fuel his huge fast-food orders; he eats multiple pizzas in a sitting and assures everyone this is misery. After he has a few encounters with a woman named Tammy, he convinces her to head to Houston so he can attend a seminar given by Pat Dupree, a life coaching guru who says “life is constantly testing our commitment to what we say we want.” Even after he’s received some of his idol’s spurious advice, Teddy can’t stop the wild, disastrous ride he’s on. At one point he lands in prison, convincing his sister, Pam, a veterinarian, to pay his bail. Teddy’s fate is all there in Pam’s reaction to his offer to pay her back in personal training sessions: “She smiles and starts laughing, laughing like crazy and shaking her head.” She drives off, leaving Daytona Teddy Riggs speeding toward his unhinged future.
Part satire, part wake-up call, and all openhearted perspective, this debut promises excellent work to come from its author.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9798885740784
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
