An emotionally honest and captivating story about grief, family, and the stories we tell in this digital age.
In Tourtelot’s novel, when a teenager’s grief over her best friend’s sudden death collides with her mother’s curated online persona, a family begins to unravel.
Told through the dual perspectives of Indie, a sharp and wounded teenager, and her mother, Kate, a real estate agent and lifestyle blogger, this novel explores themes of loss, belief, and the shifting ground of identity. The story opens with Kate driving frantically along the Taconic State Parkway, fearing for her missing daughter, Indie. From there, the narrative rewinds to the months following the sudden death of Indie’s best friend, Maddy, a loss that shatters Indie’s sense of safety and belonging. Indie’s grief takes the form of withdrawal and obsessive searching—into conspiracy theories, online gurus, and altered states of consciousness—as she struggles to make sense of life after Maddy. Meanwhile, Kate tries to hold her family together. She writes curated, witty posts for her online column (“And that’s how the sausage is made, folks”), projecting control and confidence to her readers while privately unraveling. Her marriage to Ethan deteriorates under the weight of unspoken resentments, while her connection to Indie falters as she fails to bridge the gap between her daughter’s anguish and her own pragmatism. As Indie flirts with dangerous influences online and in person, Kate confronts her own illusions about family, community, and marriage. By weaving together the mother’s and daughter’s perspectives, Tourtelot captures both the rawness of grief and the barriers to communication across generations. The author excels at rendering the textures of small-town life, the absurdities of online performance, and the interior chaos of grief. The dual points of view and inclusion of blog posts, text messages, and other forms of media add richness to the text. Indie’s chapters feel raw and vulnerable, much like her teenage self; Kate’s chapters can at times feel overly polished, but this reflects the online persona that she has carefully manufactured. The pacing occasionally meanders when Indie’s philosophical digressions risk growing repetitive, but the short chapters generally keep the action moving.
An emotionally honest and captivating story about grief, family, and the stories we tell in this digital age.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9798896360483
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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