An ambitious, sweeping, and tragic love story.
A decades-spanning tale of two actors finding, losing, and finding each other again.
Brodie’s compulsively readable novel opens in the summer of 2000, as AJ Graves works at her small-town Massachusetts video rental store before her senior year of high school. AJ spends her days dreaming of writing for Saturday Night Live, writing fan fiction, and obsessively watching Astronauticals, her favorite 1960s improvised SF show. Her life takes a dramatic turn when Noah Drew, the youngest member of the infamous Drew acting family, starts working at the store, too. The two initially bond over their love of comedy and acting, but they soon grow inseparable through shared family trauma. When Noah’s notorious great-aunt, Eudora Drew, offers to train them in the art of drama, their relationship—both on and offstage—is lit ablaze. “Your scene partner is your life,” reads the improvisation handbook written by Eudora’s husband and Noah’s late great-uncle, Ezell. And this is true for the pair—until Noah vanishes without a word. Seven years later, the two are unexpectedly reunited to work on an Astronauticals prequel called Into the Blue. When AJ is cast in a much larger role than expected, their simmering chemistry threatens to engulf them. As the production comes to a close, Noah reveals why he suddenly left all those years ago—and the past, present, and future come into devastating focus. Over the next decade, the two are unable to fully escape the “the connection between them, a thin gold cord” passionately tethering them together. Toward the end, the plot begins to feel repetitive and overly melodramatic. There are only so many times one couple can break up and make up before it begins to grate. Regardless, Brodie manages to build a universe that feels real, as well as a cast of complex characters full of humanity. The acting and improv worlds provide fertile ground that allows Brodie to explore ambition, talent, passion, and the life-changing power of art.
An ambitious, sweeping, and tragic love story.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798217093700
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Thousand Voices/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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