An emotional and inspiring story of a family connected through their love of music.
Graham’s historical novel explores tragedies of life and the power of family bonds.
Sharing a deep sentimentality, siblings Mattie and Soren have always been close. In the 1960s, Soren chooses to channel his emotions through music, while Mattie drops out of college to pursue her sense of justice by campaigning against the Vietnam War. Everything changes when Soren is drafted; he gets hooked on drugs while fighting in the war, and upon his return to America, the music scene fuels his vices. By 1984, Soren is unhoused and estranged from his family until a chance encounter with the aunt who spurred his love for music renews his sense of purpose. She helps him get his life and his band back together and to eventually face his family again. Mattie is happy to be reunited with her brother, but his homecoming puts her back in contact with his guitarist, Mark, with whom she shared an on-and-off relationship in the ’60s that left her a single mother to their daughter, Emmy. Soren and Mark slowly earn their ways back into Mattie’s and Emmy’s lives, but when Emmy shows a proclivity for music, Mattie fears her daughter may follow in their unsteady footsteps. (“She knew that if Emmy pursued a career in music her daughter would be vulnerable to a world that Mattie had lost faith in.”) While the complex web of relationships may at first be overwhelming to readers unfamiliar with previous books in the author’s West of the Divide series, Graham has succeeded in crafting a sweeping, stand-alone intergenerational saga spanning the 1960s to the 2000s. The vividly observed details bring the family to life; the novel reads like a true family history. Soren’s narrative stands out for its nuance and emotional depth as it deftly foreshadows Emmy’s decision to pursue a similar passion.
An emotional and inspiring story of a family connected through their love of music.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781965293218
Page Count: 514
Publisher: Go to Publish
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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