The characters and themes at the center of this story don’t quite deliver.
A woman dissatisfied with her present circumstances seeks solace in a past situationship.
At 37, Zuzu lives in New York with her high-powered attorney wife, Agnes, and their son, Gideon, and her resentment grows with every email Agnes sends. When Gideon is invited to spend the weekend with a friend, Zuzu and Agnes plan a trip to Massachusetts to check on Agnes’s ex-girlfriend, who’s had a health scare, and visit Zuzu’s college friend and eternal crush, Cash, who lives nearby. Then Zuzu’s estranged father dies, so they fold his memorial service into their plans. Grief, nostalgia, and midlife ennui drive Zuzu to act out. The novel moves from the present to Zuzu’s college escapades with Cash to her meet-cute with Agnes. Zuzu fell in love with Agnes in law school, and while Agnes excelled in her career, Zuzu failed the bar twice. Narrating the story, Zuzu explains that all she’s ever really wanted is to be desired. She pines for Cash, whose marriage also seems to be faltering. Though she loves Agnes, she frames their life together as a consolation prize to what her life could have been with Cash had he only wanted her the way she still so desperately needs him to. The weekend forces Zuzu to confront how little she’s grown in two decades. Much of the story relies on happenstance: First, Zuzu’s father dies. Then, it just so happens that Noel, the only other biracial person Zuzu knew growing up, attended the same college she did and now lives in the apartment above her sister’s house. Zuzu is his obsession, and he’s always on hand for her to toy with, the same way Cash toys with her. Zuzu’s experience of race is regularly referenced without being fully explored, stunting an otherwise engaging throughline. Finally, a sudden repair required in Cash’s house leads his wife and daughter to leave town for the weekend. He conveniently stays behind, alone in a hotel. It’s fine, necessary even, for characters to behave badly, and for coincidence to play a part, but they should do so in interesting ways.
The characters and themes at the center of this story don’t quite deliver.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851609
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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