Even under pressure, sisterhood is powerful in this entertaining and well-crafted novel.
What happens to three adult sisters when they suddenly find out their father has a favorite?
The Fisher sisters—Alex, Nancy, and Eva—know everything about each other. Or maybe they know nothing. When they gather with their parents, Vivienne and Patrick, and some of their kids and significant others at a posh glass-walled vacation house in the British countryside, everything breaks down. Watching the sisters sort out their lives and put them back together is at the heart of this warm, funny, insightful novel. The book kicks off with what seems to be a near-disaster: As Patrick is taking photos of the sisters outdoors, a tree behind them starts to fall. In a moment, he rushes past Alex and Nancy to pull Eva out of danger. It’s shocking—like most parents, Patrick and Vivienne have always said they don’t have a favorite child. But it seems he does. Worse, the family doesn’t get to hash it out in private, because Eva’s teenage daughter Lucy caught the rescue on video, and of course it goes viral. The near miss turns out to be a disaster after all, cracking open the pleasant surfaces of the sisters’ lives. Alex, the oldest, has just had her third child at 45, and she’s struggling with exhaustion, with her stale marriage, and with a secret obsession with her first love, whom she stalks on social media like a teenager. Nancy, the middle sister, is frazzled by her job as a radiologist and by sharing custody of her young daughter, Georgie, with her jerk of an ex. Eva is the youngest and by far the richest; she invented a board game for her kid that turned into a bestseller. The vacation house is her treat, but money doesn’t solve everything. The narrative line is complex, moving back and forth in time and among the sisters and their mother, but Littlewood handles it skillfully. Her characters, flawed as they are, are engaging and relatable, and her sense of family dynamics captures all the old wounds, shifting hierarchies, inside jokes, and sturdy if skewed love the sisters share.
Even under pressure, sisterhood is powerful in this entertaining and well-crafted novel.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781250857118
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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