This surreal, touching novel takes a deep dive into mental illness with raw honesty and a sliver of hope.
In Homeless’ novel, a young man suffering from severe depression contemplates life with the help of imaginary blue whales.
Thirty-one-year-old Daniel has suffered from depression ever since he can remember; he sees sad-looking blue whales who follow him wherever he goes. After a painful breakup with his girlfriend, Laura, the McDonald’s-loving Daniel steals her boat and takes off on the ocean, intending to bury his heart in an empty Big Mac container. His time out at sea presents new challenges as he’s forced to confront his past choices and current hallucinations. In between flashbacks to his and Laura’s relationship (beginning with the early happy days and continuing through the explosive final fight that ended everything), Daniel experiences visions that slowly help him understand himself. Making a desperate appeal to The Happy-Looking Blue Whale King to fill the hole in his chest, Daniel must decide once and for all whether to fight his way back to life or finally succumb to the literal and metaphorical depths. From the novel’s opening sentences (“A small, bright-orange boat floats in the ocean, bobbing up and down like a Cheez-It in the deep end of God’s swimming pool”), readers will realize that this is not your typical book about depression. Homeless deftly captures how it feels to suffer from mental illness—the insecurities, the hopelessness, the ill-advised coping mechanisms that come from a life lived in pain. While some of the metaphors can be a bit too heavy-handed (“Daniel understands [that] this construct, this great and miserable yet vastly impressive wall, is his handiwork, that he built it himself, deceptive inch by deceptive inch, with his own self-imposed limitations and constant negative thinking”), the rawness of Daniel’s struggle practically vibrates throughout the text. The result is a crude, dreamlike, and brutally frank look at depression and its depths.
This surreal, touching novel takes a deep dive into mental illness with raw honesty and a sliver of hope.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781960988379
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Clash Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 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
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