Daring plots with evocative prose and complex characters.
Searle’s short stories delve into the emotional messiness of the human experience.
This collection gathers slice-of-life vignettes that explore the complex and often untidy nature of emotion, with plots that range from mundane encounters to more dramatic events. “The Quiet Car,” in which a woman on a routine Amtrak ride loses her cool at her fellow passengers after receiving bad news, is followed by “Student Shooter,” in which a playwriting professor who longs to have a child becomes close to a disturbed student. Searle’s focus on conflicting emotions is especially evident in “When You Watch Me,” the story of Evvy, a 17-year-old in 1980s Arizona. She becomes infatuated with her summer college course professor, Barry; when she loses her virginity to Barry in his pool, his wife hides nearby and takes photos. Later, the wife mails the pictures to a now-adult Evvy. Though she was exploited, Evvy also derives a complicated sense of power from the experience. The titular story, “The Drama Room,” compellingly explores similar themes: In the 1980s, when PJ is a techie for her school’s drama department, the director, Ms. L., begins an inappropriate relationship with the show’s teenage star, Freddy. PJ—like most of Searle’s characters—takes the path of least resistance, laughing it off, only to regret the choice later. The Covid-19 pandemic is a motif that recurs throughout the work. “The Mask of the Red Death” follows a Massachusetts high school senior during the quarantine lockdown. Not taking the pandemic seriously, she spends spring break in Florida with friends. When she returns home, she is diagnosed with Covid-19; after unwittingly spreading the virus to her grandfather, she is isolated by her grief and depression. This story illustrates Searle’s ability to deftly capture a youthful voice in her prose: “They all stopped talking to you…when they asked you not to mention Grandad…Which you (coward that you are) didn’t wind up doing anyways, not wanting to get known as Arlington’s Typhoid-Whoever.”
Daring plots with evocative prose and complex characters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781965784310
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Pierian Springs Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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