A powerful story of faith that celebrates love and rejects fear.
A New Age prophet takes on organized religion in Kushnir’s novel.
Martha, a 45-year-old accountant and former wartime field nurse in New York, sets out to prove that God is found in mercy, which flows not from heaven but from human hands. A “barefoot theologian,” she gives sermons in New York parks, making claims that challenge the very foundations of Christian faith. According to Martha, Jesus Christ was not crucified; she posits that the narrative about his crucifixion was modeled after the Egyptian god Osiris, who rose from the dead. (“He did not come to suffer. He came to heal suffering,” she says.) Her ideas threaten those in the religious establishment, especially one Pastor Smith, who grips his copy of the Bible like a sword. Martha questions centuries of dogma, not out of malice but out of love, wanting to help people appreciate the living Jesus. She finds an ally in Lucas, a New Testament professor at a seminary in Massachusetts, who helps her set up a temple in an abandoned warehouse to propagate her theology. There, she struggles to arouse a thirst for “freedom from the dictatorship of appetite” in the people who brand her as “a Christian Taliban”; how will she respond to allegations of blasphemy, homophobia, and transphobia? Kushnir’s conceit—telling this story as a “modern parable written in the language of the 21st century”—is an inspired approach, as Jesus Christ frequently employed the parable form in his teachings. The book’s framing of the body as sacred rather than sinful is convincing, but the plea for sexual restraint might seem outdated to readers who advocate for sex-positivity (Martha believes that sex is meant only for procreation, not pleasure). The book’s length and tendency toward repetition somewhat blunt the impact of the message and risk losing the reader’s attention.
A powerful story of faith that celebrates love and rejects fear.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798262628599
Page Count: 335
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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