What could have been an inventive gothic novel descends into something close to farce.
Stand-alone horror from the author of the Nightshade Crown fantasy series.
After finding a love that was more than she’d ever hoped for, Claire Sutherland finds herself alone again. A boating accident left her a deeply traumatized orphan. A mysterious neurological ailment took her fiancé. When Elias’ mother invites her to their home for a memorial service, Claire hesitates at first. She’s never met any of Elias’ relatives because he wanted nothing to do with them. But the lure of family is too strong for Claire to resist, so she accepts the invitation to the Ashbury clan’s island compound. “Looming above everything like a dragon on its hoard,” Harrow Point is a massive assemblage of spires and gables carved into a cliff. What Claire doesn’t see from the outside is the labyrinthine rooms that spiral down into the dark depths of the ocean. Whitten has assembled all the essentials for a gothic novel. There’s an isolated and endangered heroine. There are family secrets that won’t stay hidden. And the setting is the perfect blend of the sublime and the uncanny. What this novel lacks is compelling characters and persuasive worldbuilding. There’s one character in this story who has depth, and it’s not the protagonist. It is, instead, Elias’ brother, Ash, and Claire’s refusal to recognize that he’s trying to help her gets annoying fast. She’s grieving, she longs to be part of a family again, and nothing she learned about Ash from Elias makes her inclined to trust her fiancé’s older brother. That said, Claire is dense to the point of being ridiculous and scenes that should be terrifying aren’t. One reason gothic novels are often set in the past is that this makes it easier for readers to suspend disbelief. Whitten’s contemporary setting means that the more the reader learns about the Ashbury family’s dark secrets, the less plausible they become.
What could have been an inventive gothic novel descends into something close to farce.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9780316579537
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Run for It/Orbit
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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