Full of intelligence, social consciousness, and cultural engagement.
A crew of five women friends, long-distance since college, weather the travails of their 40th year.
Each chapter of Nemens’ sophomore novel opens with a line or two from the group chat shared by Carson the writer, Gregg the politician, Hillary the doctor, Bella the litigator, and Reba the former consultant, or with one of their individual texts to or from someone else. This infrastructure helps move the timeline and the plot; in addition, a thumbnail guide to the characters appears at the beginning of the book. With five central characters, many supporting ones, and a trajectory covering two decades, almost year by year, these elements are helpful. “Another quiet stretch for the women was 2014. In the eighteen months prior they had all turned thirty (Reba, with her basketball gap year, was the first across the threshold; Gregg brought up the rear).” As the omniscient narrator goes on to fill in details from each friend, as well as current events, cultural moments, and updates on Britney Spears, it’s tempting to picture giant timelines papering the walls of the author’s study. Her management of the five-pronged, often high-drama plot, the rotating points of view, and the characters’ constant introspection is impressive. Yet somehow the sheer complexity of it all keeps the book from developing enough momentum to ever become fully immersive, and none of the five main characters evokes the kind of identification that invites the reader to connect emotionally. A typical moment has Carson meditating on the ways she and each of her friends has fallen short of their dreams. Gregg, for example, “was blind to the gotcha of promoting progressivism while being inextricably bound up with the latest (last?) stage of late-stage capitalism; she couldn’t see, or wouldn’t acknowledge, her normie marriage, the patriarchy of her prenup, how her big-shouldered and bruising careerist tendencies, cloaked as they were in pastel blazers, were only nominally better than Zeke’s cutthroat business acumen.” In fact, that cutthroat acumen of Gregg’s husband Zeke will play a major role in the book’s gut-punch climax, rewarding the reader who’s paying attention to all the details.
Full of intelligence, social consciousness, and cultural engagement.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781963108668
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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