A promising—if somewhat exhausting—debut by a writer with energetic comic gifts.
In a Las Vegas gated community, love and marriage are often at odds, with money doing its share to gum up the works.
Singer’s very funny, latter-day Jane Austen-esque debut revolves around a pair of characters with a distinctive meet-cute in their distant past. In 1979, 9-year-old Kurt Richter’s older half brother showed up to babysit with a teenage girlfriend named Eugenie Zepp in tow. Eugenie is quickly revealed to be the love of young Kurt’s life, but destiny is never on their side. By 2024, Eugenie is the No. 1 realtor in an elite Vegas exurb called Alluvian, now divorced and living with her adult son, Austin. Kurt, the developer of Alluvian, has two ex-wives and the most constant figure in his children’s lives is their nanny, Janelle Borshowa, a hardy Canadian girl Kurt met on a hunting trip. Some locals believe he killed his first wife and buried her on the erstwhile golf course of which their homes once had verdant views; it’s now an arid wasteland where Kurt is trying to get permits to build condominium towers. Much other drama surrounds these characters, their neighbors, and their offspring, maybe a little too much: Singer’s appetite for inventing hilarious complications runs at top speed right into the final pages, and her more-is-more sensibility manifests even at the sentence level, where the throughline zooms around like a silver ball released in a pinball machine. For example: “Eugenie Zepp wasn’t stupid or even naïve, but when it came to picking suitable dudes, it was like she said Hold my beer to her adult brain and let the high school girl in her take the wheel. Eugenie Zepp’s type was the eighties-style toxic male too afraid to face his own mortality, whereas Austin’s generation had learned to live with doom after their first active-shooter drill in preschool.” Overstuffed, yes. Gaudy, even. And totally Las Vegan, if you think about it—the capital of more is more; surely the author agrees with the sentiment she gives to Eugenie: “There wasn’t a thing she didn’t love about Las Vegas.”
A promising—if somewhat exhausting—debut by a writer with energetic comic gifts.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781668098318
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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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