A delightful love letter to great literature.
A bookstore owner discovers her shop has a unique and wonderous secret in Andersen’s novel.
Aspiring author Aurelia Lyndham has struggled with writer’s block since the deaths of her mother and Aunt Marigold, which occurred less than a year apart. To cope with these losses, she focuses on running On the Square Books, a bookshop she inherited from Marigold. The business has a specialized inventory—it only sells books written by authors born before 1900. It also holds an incredible surprise. After hearing voices coming from the shop late at night, Aurelia discovers that characters from the books on her Recommended Reads table have emerged from the pages to socialize. She befriends various figures from classic literature, including Count Vronsky from Anna Karenina and Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. Aurelia is soon living a double life, running the bookshop by day and spending time with the literary characters at night. When Count Vronsky laments his tragic and unsettled fate, Aurelia discovers the inspiration she needs to write again. Her project piques the interest of book editor Oliver Pearce; as Aurelia and Oliver work on editing her novel, their friendship and collaboration leads to a deeper attraction, and Aurelia begins to wonder if she will find a happy ending in her own life. Andersen’s debut romance is a charming tale of a writer finding inspiration and a chance at true love via the characters in her favorite classic novels. Aurelia is an amiable protagonist who’s trying to rebuild her life after two devastating losses; her relationship with Oliver Pearce is well developed and cleverly mirrors the story she develops for Count Vronsky. Andersen is a talented storyteller with a knack for vivid descriptions. In one scene, a literary character reaches for a book, “Only—his hand went right through it, turning into a white mist with what looked like black dots running across it…or were they letters?” The novel is an appealing blend of fantasy and romance, rooted in a love of classic novels.
A delightful love letter to great literature.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798998747700
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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