An earnest, affecting novel about the painful consequences of the lack of effective mental health care.
A medical student investigates her grandmother’s history in a psychiatric hospital in Reid’s debut novel.
Corinth Eaton is in her third year of medical school, living with her boyfriend, Adam, and her best friend, Cecily. Her struggles in her surgical rotation are giving her anxiety, and she’s been depressed since the death of her father two years earlier. When a domineering resident forces Corinth to cover up his critical mistake with a patient, Corinth is suspended from medical school. At home, she walks in on Adam and Cecily in the shower. With her personal and professional lives in shambles, Corinth looks to the past for understanding. She begins a rotation at the local psychiatric hospital, where her grandmother, Mary Esther, had been a patient for decades. Corinth retrieves Mary Esther’s old chart from storage to learn more about her history and discover who Mary Esther had been before her long institutionalization sapped her spirit. (“Her whole family disregarded who Granny truly was, who she’d been before the hospitalizations and the drugs and the shock therapy.”) This heartrending novel poignantly acknowledges the many women lost to the inadequate mental health care of the mid-20th century. Though Mary Esther remains alive, she is essentially a lost soul, her spirit buried by her poor medical treatment and the people in her life who failed to understand her. Her history runs parallel to Corinth’s story, which makes some of the protagonist’s discoveries anticlimactic, since Corinth is hunting for information the reader already knows. Mary Esther was often helpless against the prejudices and social mores of her day, and the story excels at conveying the soul-numbing frustration of a woman who’s never given a chance to speak for herself. From her grandmother’s experience, Corinth movingly learns to insist upon her own agency after spending the first half of the novel being browbeaten by more forceful personalities.
An earnest, affecting novel about the painful consequences of the lack of effective mental health care.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781985904781
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 22, 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
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