A mild, knowing campus comedy of stagnation and reinvention.
Mathematics, midlife restlessness, and a campus mystery converge in Talvila’s satire of academic life.
Jeff Orange is an untenured professor at British Columbia’s fictional Invigus University. He’s frittered the summer away on an expansion of √2π, whose denominators amusingly keep turning up prime (“It was such a simple calculation but so puzzling”). Elaine Plum, his perpetually overworked colleague, has spent hers relearning some of the algebra she’s forgotten while spending all her time teaching. Along with department chair Howard Quince, they orbit the mystery of a drug-dispensing professor called Ed Lemon, who has disappeared and posthumously narrates much of the story. Orange and Plum are drawn into intrigues involving a Romani visiting scholar, an espionage-related claim on Orange’s research, and deep personal secrets. Secret sibling and gender-related plot twists ensue, relationships are swapped, and the cast of eccentrics settles into a warm, mutually accepting community. The plot is cut with many mathematical digressions about topology, prime numbers, and infinite series; the book also has a sustained theme of self-reinvention, with investigations into cross-dressing, hormone use, and variations of sexuality and identity. But beneath the surface, the book’s main preoccupation is academic precarity: the gulf between the research stars and the “foot soldiers” who do the teaching, the comforts of community among faculty oddballs, and campus drama and politics. Talvila, a retired mathematics professor, clearly knows his terrain. His lightly jaundiced sketches of committee theater, the hypocrisies of the publish-or-perish paradigm, and campus credentialism ring true and amusing. The slow-burning disappearance plot keeps things moving without ever generating real tension, which suits the novel’s affectionate, unhurried tone and broadens its appeal beyond an academic audience. (The frequent mathematical interludes have the opposite effect, at least for the uninitiated.) The resulting mix is generally pleasant and good-humored rather than sharp—stopping short of drawing blood, this is a satire that’s content to affectionately tease its subjects, with an undercurrent of melancholy.
A mild, knowing campus comedy of stagnation and reinvention.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781038354792
Page Count: 234
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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