Sprawling and elegant—a novel that feels both old-fashioned and bracingly inventive.
A moving, psychologically acute, formally surprising family saga.
Puchner’s latest unfolds at first like a familiar (though stylish) literary romance. It’s summer 2004. Cece, about to marry a promising young doctor named Charlie, has arrived early at her fiance’s family lake house in Salish, Montana, where she makes final wedding preparations alongside their unlikely officiant, Garrett—a Middlebury friend of Charlie’s who, after a tragic death for which he felt responsible, dropped out of college and returned home to Montana to heft baggage at the airport and tend to both his psychic wounds and his dying father. Garrett is an atheist who doesn’t believe in marriage, an environmentalist who works for a polluter, a risk taker, and an incorrigible smartass; he and Cece clash immediately. The reader knows just where this is headed…but the inevitable romantic chaos (which takes place amid a norovirus outbreak that picks off the wedding party one by one) turns out to be not a destination but the starting point for an unusual and captivating family saga that will span 50 years, about half of them in a grim but realistic future of wildfire smoke and vanishing species. Cece and Garrett cross paths with Charlie (and his several wives) at first rarely and awkwardly, but later more regularly and affectionately. The next generation replicates and complicates the dynamic: Cece and Garrett’s daughter, Lana, and Charlie’s son, Jasper, are close friends, and after an adolescent entanglement that founders quickly and ends poorly, Lana—like her father—feels deeply guilty about what she’s done to Jasper, whose life takes a dark turn.
Sprawling and elegant—a novel that feels both old-fashioned and bracingly inventive.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780385550666
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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