A novel that offers a spirited but unevenly executed take on bouncing back.
After her marriage falls apart, a mother of two must figure out how to get her life back on track in Wright’s novel.
Before she met bank CEO Jack Davis in 2013, Emma Davis was an up-and-coming software developer who built and sold her own successful company. During their 10-year marriage, he used nearly all the money she’d earned on failed investment opportunities. After Emma learns that Jack is having an affair with a restaurant server he met during one of their family dinners, he leaves her. Now that he’s gone, she has no income, no emotional support, and no idea what to do next. She takes a low-level tech job and loses whatever standing she had in the community. “What I desperately wanted was to stop loathing myself so much,” she narrates. “Rotten mother. Horrible at relationships. Pathetic career. Fat. Alone. And just plain scared.” Then creative writing professor Evy Hanover moves into Emma’s small suburban hamlet of Belmont, New York, and the pair strike up an instant and intense friendship. Evy seems to be just what Emma needs in her life; she convinces Emma to hire a divorce attorney, to stand up to Jack, to use some dating apps, and to live healthier. However, the future isn’t quite as bright as Evy makes it seem, and once Emma learns about the secret that Evy’s keeping, she questions whether their friendship will be enough to see them through. Emma’s first-person perspective effectively gives Wright’s novel a lighthearted and conversational tone, and it’s filled with humorous dating mishaps, clever gripes about dieting, and several slapstick moments. It initially presents as a fun, quick read; however, it later delves into some darker territory, including topics such as eating disorders, mental illness, and profoundly abusive relationships—each of which are described with greater nonchalance than readers may feel they deserve. The story is also weighed down by excessive detail that does little to move the plot forward, and some characters are rendered in such exaggerated fashion that they lack nuance.
A novel that offers a spirited but unevenly executed take on bouncing back.Pub Date: May 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798991539302
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Saint Johns Creek Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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