Charming if sometimes a little hard to follow.
An estate-sale manager in a small Massachusetts town stumbles on its worst-kept secret.
When Emma Lewis’ parents ask her to move back to Harrow and take over Estate of Mind—their business staging home sales for estates, downsizers, and others—she steps in with relative ease, having been been sticking price tags on candelabras all her life. Since they’re retiring to Cape Cod, they also offer her their house, and have already arranged a roommate: her father’s friend Frank Crowley, a retired math teacher, recently widowed when his wife was struck by lightning on the golf course. The warm relationship that develops between Frank and Emma as they share the house and soon, the responsibilities of the business, is at the heart of this tale of love and money and love-for-money. Estate of Mind soon has the opportunity to put on a sale at the infamous house at 1010 Quail Ridge Road, which operated variously as a B&B and a brothel known as Lola’s Ladies. Meanwhile, Frank has begun dating Connie Winooski, a recent widow and mother of the police chief, Luke Winooski. When Luke and Emma also start seeing each other, sticky situations arise. This book is all about the complications and overlapping romantic alliances that are the leitmotif of small-town drama, and some readers may find it useful to make a character list to keep track of all the names and relationships. For example, who is Theo? Well, he’s former kindergarten teacher Athena’s son; she’s now dating Manny, the disgraced former police chief, who was married to Lola, the “housemother.” Theo himself is dating Rain, aka Francine, the daughter of Frank’s dead wife, Ginger, from her marriage to Stefan. Lipman seems to be having herself a grand old time with this sort of thing. For the Daily Double, what’s the connection between John-Paul, Uncle Paul, and Paulina? Devoted readers will be ready for the quiz.
Charming if sometimes a little hard to follow.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063322257
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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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