Strong on atmosphere but light on plot, as if the story itself were paralyzed by the heat wave it so effectively depicts.
A promising young filmmaker visits the summer home of a famous director and her daughter.
Shortly after taking a workshop with her idol, Ellen, in London, Ruby is delighted by an invitation to come out to the director’s place in the English countryside. Having had her first short film screened at Sundance, Ruby is now working on a script for a feature, and the opportunity to get Ellen’s help as she puts the final touches on it seems a dream come true. But the visit turns out to be a different sort of dream, dominated not by creative mentorship but by intense and confusing relationships with Ellen and her 20-year-old daughter, Lara, and by a brutal July heat wave that makes even eating a meal a challenging project. Though Ellen’s home apparently has no air conditioning, it does have a swimming pool, and as Ellen is slow to offer any plan for working together and Lara is procrastinating her college applications, the two younger women spend much of their time in bikinis. “She looked at me, her hair lit up gold by the sun, the freckles on her nose. She said, what would you do if I kissed you? and before I’d even really processed that, yes, that’s what she’d said, she’d done it.” As things heat up between Lara and Ruby, Ellen announces she has to go to London. Suddenly responsible for Ellen’s chickens, her greenhouse, her house, her grounds, and her trouble-child daughter, and not yet having received any help with her script, Ruby finds she is far from up to the task, as well as quite angry. In her sophomore novel, Crimp returns to the theme of women in the arts, and her hypnotic first-person narration runs together with the dialogue, using no quotation marks. But Ruby’s shaky self-esteem and passivity about getting what she needs from this situation eventually becomes frustrating for the reader, and the slightly creepy, claustrophobic mood is like a gathering storm that never breaks. The question of whether Ellen actually intended to help Ruby or had something more exploitative in mind is never clearly answered.
Strong on atmosphere but light on plot, as if the story itself were paralyzed by the heat wave it so effectively depicts.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781250792792
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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