Complete with a section of travel tips and a favorite recipe, Palmisano’s novel coddles the reader like an airplane blanket.
An American consumed with wanderlust comes to a Greek island where she feels strangely at home among the locals.
Palmisano’s debut overflows with the features of romantic escapism: beautiful scenery, delicious food, women empowered by gentle magical powers, and a variety of romances in which love must conquer complications. Since graduating from college seven years ago, the plucky heroine, Marjory “Jory” St. James, has worked as a waitress (proudly eschewing her estranged father’s wealth) to pay for her frequent travels. She heads, purposely without a guidebook, to the Greek island of Naxos and finds lodging in a village called Potamia. Oddly and too conveniently, she is the only tourist in a town touristy enough that an international boutique hotel chain wants to purchase the guesthouse where she’s staying. Jory becomes enmeshed in the lives of three villagers with special powers received from female ancestors and a magic stream. Guesthouse owner Cressida Thermopolis’ cooking imparts emotions with transformative powers to those who partake. Elderly Mago’s power lies in her ability to sew exactly what the wearer needs. Unhappily married Nefeli sees “portents.” But the three women are also suffering, Cressida emotionally immobilized after her young husband’s death, Mago afraid to marry her longtime lover because she might have cancer, and Nefeli unable to express love to or receive love from her husband. If Jory’s full-throttle acceptance by the others as they eat exquisite meals and share emotional wisdom is implausibly easy, plausibility is not the point. Meanwhile, Jory meets the obligatory handsome stranger, another seemingly footloose American traveler, and their mutual attraction overpowers her self-proclaimed desire to avoid emotional entanglement. But is he to be trusted? And will all these women come to grips with their fears and their powers to shape their futures? Is there any doubt?
Complete with a section of travel tips and a favorite recipe, Palmisano’s novel coddles the reader like an airplane blanket.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757499
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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