A labyrinthine and heartfelt look at the trials and triumphs of collective action.
As New Englanders fall ill with a mysterious affliction, a small group tries to find a cause and a cure.
Having lost her job and the lease on her rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, Eve Yalen has moved back into her childhood home in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her two young kids, leaving behind her musician husband (who comes up on weekends) and most of her ambitions as a writer. Though she’s the daughter of a professor and a well-known novelist, Eve struggles to recognize her new life in the hippified atmosphere of small-town Northampton. But one day she runs into Demeter, a beloved friend from her girlhood. Demeter is in Northampton temporarily, seeking care for her daughter, who’s suffering from a mysterious illness that causes extreme photosensitivity. Demeter—free-spirited, brilliant, itinerant—gives Eve a chance to feel useful and, frankly, adventurous again. As Demeter and Eve desperately try to figure out what’s causing the girl’s illness, which doctors dismiss and authorities want to use as an excuse to remove her from Demeter’s custody, they learn that there’s a small community of others impacted by this illness, which some have dubbed “Emily’s disease” in homage to Emily Dickinson, the poet who famously stayed indoors. Bit by mysterious bit, the novel weaves in the perspectives of other people whose loved ones have been affected by “Sun Madness.” By shuffling through these figures’ stories and gradually bringing them together, Abel explores a rich tapestry of themes: the heartbreak and power of female friendship, the isolation that can exist at the heart of motherhood, class tensions, climate change, medical gaslighting, the Covid-19 pandemic, and much more. If this seems like a lot, it is, but Abel’s writing is never grim and the swirl of theme and plot and character is vibrant.
A labyrinthine and heartfelt look at the trials and triumphs of collective action.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780593979532
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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