Buoyant and funny page by page, this book nonetheless has a sad and serious heart.
Checking in on a group of college friends as they face the realities of adulthood, one party at a time.
It’s two years after graduation from the University of Pennsylvania when we meet them, running out of mixers but not cocaine as they ring in 2008 at a New Year’s Eve party at the funky Lower East Side apartment of a couple of the guys. The point of view rotates among five key players of the extended group as they explore who they’ve become and what they feel about each other now. Looks like some are headed for love, others for substance abuse, others for lucrative careers. We will watch these threads play out as we look in on them four more times: at a Cancún wedding in 2014, a Labor Day birthday party in Amagansett in 2018, a Halloween party in suburban New Jersey in 2022, and, ineluctably, a funeral in lower Manhattan in 2024. The antic high spirits of Ginder’s earlier work—the first, The People We Hate at the Wedding (2017), was truly a riot—have shaded bittersweet; this book is about the pains of aging and the ripple effect of mistakes. Not to say there aren’t still some acerbically funny lines and great set pieces. One character has rejected a suitor with early onset testicular cancer: “I can’t believe you walked away from a guy with cancer.” “Whatever, it has a treatment rate of, like, ninety-five percent.” A newly out young man discovers an obstacle to gay romance: “All they ever wanted to do was lecture him about Larry Kramer. And nothing—not coke, or Nina Guzman, or a naked Nancy Reagan—could kill a boner quite like Larry Kramer.” The fact is, aging is no fun for this crowd. Whether they become parents or don’t, whether they find love or don’t, adulthood is a narrowing of options, a hardening of patterns, more loss than gain. “If at one point there had been a thousand paths available to her, each choice she had made had slashed that figure in half, and then in half, and then in half again.” Is part of the problem that everyone is so very white and privileged, and had a thousand paths in the first place? That doesn’t come up, but one wonders.
Buoyant and funny page by page, this book nonetheless has a sad and serious heart.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781668051771
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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