Creepy and crawly but not quite hair-raising, the book struggles to find its footing as either literary fiction or horror.
A 20-something woman discovers that that an all-trans, all-female commune is too good to be true in this debut novel.
Trans and bisexual in New York, stymied in her desire to be a journalist “like all the other Hot Freelance Girls,” and unsuccessfully saving money for bottom surgery, the unnamed protagonist of Byron’s novel has plenty to deal with before you take into account that she faces sleep paralysis demons almost every night. She might be able to write off these nightly visitors as the unfortunate consequences of a religious upbringing in Indiana that included three brutal years of conversion therapy and a personal interest in demonology—if only they weren’t starting to show up when she’s still awake. Into this mix comes an umpteenth invitation from Ash, her ex-girlfriend and fellow Indiana native, to join a self-sufficient rural community named for 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin that Ash insists is “not a cult.” Disillusioned by the city’s hyper-competitive social scene and hoping a new setting might help chase the nightmares away, the narrator journeys back to the Midwest. But once there, she begins to discover that some utopias come with high price tags. Byron has rich veins to mine—religious shame, the commodification of trauma, the lengths people will go in the name of bodily autonomy, and the limits of solidarity—but she misses opportunities to fully delve into these ideas and all their complications. The supporting characters are thinly drawn, the pacing is uneven, and the narrator’s disaffection and reluctance to take concrete action in the face of escalating violence may emotionally distance some readers from even the novel’s most disquieting sequences.
Creepy and crawly but not quite hair-raising, the book struggles to find its footing as either literary fiction or horror.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781668087862
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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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