An artful and affecting novel of loss and reconnection.
A museum curator’s job in London forces her to confront an old heartache in Ward’s novel.
Noel Enfield has been stuck in her position as the Director of Collections at Massachusetts’ Field-Lyons Museum for years. She allowed her career to languish to give her full attention to her husband and stepdaughter, Alice. Now, just as her marriage is ending in divorce and her relationship with Alice is in doubt, Noel has received an offer: a six-month appointment at the renowned Addison Gallery in London, to be followed by a promotion when she returns to the Field-Lyons. She leaps at the opportunity—how could she not, especially when she learns her accommodations will be large enough for Alice to come visit? But London isn’t exactly a clean slate for Noel. She was a university student there, years ago, when she fell in love with Bryn Jones, a Welsh artist whom she planned to marry. The relationship ended soon after Noel discovered she was pregnant, and she retreated to America without a husband, a child, or her degree. Now, Noel’s position at the Addison has placed her at the center of the London art scene, where long-lost acquaintances from her university days—including the now-established Bryn—pop back into her life. It turns out the past is much more complicated than Noel ever knew, but will pursuing a chance at the family Noel might have had cost her the one she’s desperately fighting to save? Ward writes of art and the art world with precision and vigor, as here when she describes one of Bryn’s paintings: “The painting—unfinished—was of a lake…Bold strokes and varying thicknesses of paint suggested textured fields in the distance, remnants of snow on the mountains, red flowers—or were those lichens?—dotting the rocks lakeside.” The story deftly leaps back and forth between the early 1990s and the present, crafting a romance that, while predictable in places, always manages to hold the contented reader in the palm of its hand.
An artful and affecting novel of loss and reconnection.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798896360667
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
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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