A sprawling but playful and black-humored sophomore effort that upends standard storytelling tropes.
Stitch offers an epic series of tales-within-tales that defy expectations.
This sprawling novel is variously dizzying, maddening, and meandering, which adds to the charm of its four interlocking tales. The narrative begins with an untitled story featuring Clara, who struggles with various disabilities and spends much of her time lying down: “Ceilings, especially, were the pages of her atlas. On them, she could map worlds.” To pass the time, her friends beg for a story. “The Tale of the Enchanted Road” spins a dystopian saga of Billy Stringer, a sportswriter who’s struggling to navigate a world where literature is banned as a terrorist act (“The recent emergence of Gilgamesh is very worrying”). Yet Stringer’s involvement deepens in the literati underground thanks to his bellhop brother, Vince, who reels off the shortest story, “The Tale of the Porter and the Gin.” The book’s tightest and zaniest offering, it features an unexpected visit from a decidedly sodden Charles Dickens, who brutally dismisses his host’s literary ambitions (“This was a shit sandwich, Vinny”) amid the dramatic revelation that he’s working on some SF writing of his own. That device sets up the novel’s more challenging second act. “The Tale of the Isle of Truth” focuses on a group of colonists who are analyzing forbidden works for a shadowy collective, the Magistracy, whose Kafkaesque edicts will feel all too familiar in a world battling antidemocratic insurgency. So will the yearnings of archivist Arenaceous Nell and his daughter, Lil, for a higher purpose beyond the busy work that still remains for them after the island closes as a surveillance station. Readers will be drawn to how their natural hunger for freedom chafes against the constraints imposed by the relentlessly creepy Stationmaster Jasper Fafl: “We are the eye that does not blink. The eye that must never shut.”
Stopping there might have served readers well, but instead, Stitch charges into the final story, “The Tale of the Three Voyages,” which serves up a hard-boiled saga of Liam Téad, a private investigator who’s been hired to find an overweening media magnate’s missing twin daughter. The tale proudly shows plenty of Raymond Chandler–esque attitude (“He liked that you-can-leave-your-door-open-around-here feeling even if it was pure fantasy”), but it takes its sweet time resolving Liam’s basic assignment before Clara returns to the narrative, and the author begins tying up the various loose ends. “Three Voyages,” at more than 300 pages in length, feels as if it might have worked better as a stand-alone book; it certainly could have used some serious tightening to justify its present position. Its rambling nature will put off some readers, although whether that proves to be a feature or a bug will essentially come down to personal preference. Stitch’s playful storytelling tricks won’t move readers who desire brevity as an end in itself. But for those who desire an antidote to our current blink-it-and-miss-it culture, this novel may well occupy a point of pride on their bedside tables. A sprawling but playful and black-humored sophomore effort that upends standard storytelling tropes.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781963846423
Page Count: 760
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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